The Myth of Silent Spring: Rethinking the Origins of American Environmentalism by Chad Montrie (review)

The origin story of American environmentalism is well known. The ingredients: postwar economic growth, a consumer revolution, an explosion of automobile ownership, mass migration to the suburbs, increased leisure time and outdoor recreation, new technologies that simultaneously promised to improve the lives of Americans and potentially end life as we know it, etc. These components evolved together in interdependent but asymmetrical fashion until they were ignited by a catalyst. In 1962, Rachel Carson's Silent Spring provided the spark and the rest is history. The only problem is that this accepted story bears little resemblance to what actually happened. The recycling of this myth is not only misleading but has important implications for contemporary efforts to address the environmental crises we face. This is what Chad Montrie argues in The Myth of Silent Spring: Rethinking the Origins of American Environmentalism.

In The Myth of Silent Spring, Chad Montrie forges a necessary corrective to how we understand the origins of American environmentalism. At first sight, one might wonder how such a relatively small book (it is just 159 pages of text) could level such a blow to the accepted metanarrative. But, like the subject of Montrie's inquiry, his book retains a gravity greatly disproportionate to its size.

The author skillfully weaves a powerful counter-narrative that is part historiography and part social history. Montrie argues that to really understand the origins of American environmentalism, we have to begin not in the cultural conditions and ferment of the mid-twentieth century but instead look back to the beginnings of industrialization. Viewed in this longer dureé, the history of the origins of American environmentalism gains complexity and a much more diverse cast of characters. Industrialization wrought fundamental shifts in life, culture, and how Americans related to their environment, which provoked varied new understandings of non-human nature among not only privileged white members of America's emerging middle class but among the working class, immigrants, and non-whites. In the struggle of Americans against the forces of industry to control their labor and their lives, they understood the necessity of safe work place environments, sanitary, healthy places to live, and access to essential environmental amenities including clean water and air. They organized and fought to not be polluted and these values remained central to their struggle into the mid-twentieth century.

The new telling upends the history we thought we knew. While Montrie treats Carson's brilliance and the import of Silent Spring with appropriate reverence, UAW president Walter Reuther's efforts to draw together workers' concerns with wages and workplace safety with the fight for clean air and a healthy environment takes center stage. Workers and environmentalists recognized a common enemy in industrial capitalism and its tendency to abuse both people and the environment. New England farmers' opposition to dams in the 19^th century, African American activists' efforts against lead, Mexican farmworkers' fight to protect themselves from pesticides, and other movements demonstrate that while the "inclusive environmentalism" Montrie recovers in his social history may appear an anomaly viewed from 2018, the intersection of environmental, public health, social and economic justice concerns was much more commonplace than we often assume. Because we do not recognize this fact, we are victims of a mythological account of environmentalism, in which it is seen as hostile to working-class and economic concerns, rather than intertwined with them.

Montrie's work demonstrates the power of challenging categories we assume fixed and considering the possibility that the past was in fact different from the present. The result is a complete re-ordering of how we understand the term "environmentalism" and who is an "environmentalist"—a re-ordering, this reviewer would argue, that is essential if we hope to begin to build an inclusive global movement to address climate change. The Myth of Silent Spring is an accessible, important book that promises to disrupt our understanding of American's relationship to the environment and...