Sensing Disorder: Sensory History and Future Directions for Working-Class and Urban Environmental Scholarship

As they shone upon her, the track lights of the cbs recording studio would have taken Rachel Carson a moment to adjust to. The white linen armchair in which she had been asked to sit perhaps felt cool and plush, a reminder of the staged nature of the set, which may have smelled of fresh paint and books. As the camera rolled, Carson steadily defended her new book, Silent Spring, from the accusations of American Cyanamid Corporation representative Robert White-Stevens. If Carson felt flush from the pointed, gendered nature of the spokesman’s charges against the work she had spent four years assembling, she did not reveal it. cbs’s “The Silent Spring of Rachel Carson” aired on 3 April 1963 as an audiovisual account of Carson’s written manifesto on the dangers of widespread synthetic chemical pesticide use. A plea for measured regulation, Silent Spring urged members of postwar society to assume responsibility for preventing destruction of the natural world by industrial and regulatory pest control interests.¹ Carson’s title, Silent Spring, gave lyrical expression to a dire warning: unregulated use of synthetic chemicals threatened to impoverish the world in which people and other creatures live. Silence and other sensory absences, Carson warned, would usher in this sterile new world.² The loss of a familiar seasonal soundscape formed a powerful hypothetic, conjuring readers’ associations of the spring season with the awakening sensory landscape and with related notions of health, renewal, and hope for the future. This threat formed a crucial tactic of persuasion for Carson, instilling cultural meaning into her formidable scientific critique of unregulated pesticide use. In other words, while empirical evidence supported Carson’s claims, the emotional threat of silence delivered her charge. To Rachel Carson, often credited for heralding the North American environmental movement, thinking about the senses and making sense were closely related.

This opening sketch serves two purposes. It urges the significance of the senses to North American environmental thought and, therefore, to the scholarship that interrogates it. It also parodies deficiencies in the latter. “Setting the scene” is a common rhetorical strategy in academic writing. By invoking the immediacy of physical sense in their opening passages, many scholars attempt to lure readers into engaging with more abstract ideas.³ The popularity of this technique makes sensory detail a subject most common in the introductory sections of environmental historical works. Sensory experiences and ideas themselves, until recently, have received little direct attention from environmental scholars, despite the power of human senses as instruments for advocacy; historical barometers of environmental, bodily, and moral wellness; and key historical components of ideologies about racial, ethnic, and class difference. Sensory historians, in company with diverse scholars who embrace sensory approaches, strive to bring these and other roles of the human sensory apparatus to the forefront of historical inquiry. Environmental scholars, in particular, have found sensory ideas and experiences useful for reassembling historical reactions to the modern city. They seek and examine the forms of sensory information that, encoded into discourses of identity, have given spatial logic to developing metropolises. One such scholar may ask, for example, how perceptions of the sound of ethnic dialects affected ideas about racial difference in increasingly diverse urban spaces. Or: what did body odour suggest about a person’s class? Were there particular sensations – the feel of a train’s nearby passage, the chill of poorly lit tenements – that could reveal something about a neighbourhood?

These kinds of questions have developed partly as a challenge to what many scholars consider an...