The Leader's Bookshelf, page 7
On the surface, though, Melville’s novel is a very different kind of writing. It is supposed to be sailor Ishmael’s account of the obsessive quest of Ahab, captain of the whaling ship Pequod, to exact revenge on Moby Dick, the giant white sperm whale that on the ship’s previous voyage bit off Captain Ahab’s leg at the knee. The New Yorker says of it, “Moby Dick is not a novel. It’s barely a book at all. It’s more an act of transference, of ideas and evocations hung around the vast and unknowable shape of the whale, an extended musing on the strange meeting of human history and natural history” (Philip Hoare, “What Moby Dick Means to Me,” November 3, 2011).
MOBY DICK
AUTHOR: HERMAN MELVILLE
PUBLISHED: 1851
(ORIGINALLY UNDER THE TITLE THE WHALE AND SOMETIMES HYPHENATED TOO)
Moby Dick is considered one of America’s greatest literary works. It is the story of one man, Captain Ahab’s, quest for revenge on a whale that on a previous voyage bit off his leg at the knee. Among the characters of the boat called the Pequod are First Mate Ishmael and his friend Queequeg, the latter of whom falls ill, prompting a coffin to be built in anticipation of his demise. Later on in the story, the coffin becomes a lifeboat for Ishmael. (An image we might, slightly irrelevantly, note that Hergé, creator of Tintin, plays with evocatively in his tale “The Cigars of the Pharaoh.”)
Without spoiling the plot, it is fair to say that Moby Dick is eventually tracked down, and a great fight ensues in which the whale is victorious, the ship is destroyed, and everyone is killed—except Ishmael. (Well, maybe I have spoiled it a little.)
The enduring appeal of the book lies in two quite different elements. The first is a rich narrative style in which multiple threads are intertwined, including religion, human psychology, and ethics. But the second element is much more direct and practical: the descriptions of nature and the sea. Melville himself had firsthand experience of whaling, having spent time aboard a whaling vessel called the Acushnet. He also conducted detailed research for his book, reading about, among other things, the real-life drama of a whaling vessel called the Essex that in 1820 was attacked by a sperm whale thousands of miles off the coast of South America. The Essex sank, and the twenty-man crew was forced to make for shore—suffering dehydration, starvation, and exposure on the open ocean—in the ship’s whaleboats. Soon after they made landfall, the survivors resorted to eating the bodies of the crewmen who had already died. When that proved insufficient, members of the crew drew lots to determine whom they would sacrifice so that the others could live!
That was an influence on the author, though not on the tale itself, which is essentially focused on the life-and-death struggle of the crew of the Pequod and the slow but inexorable turning of the wheels of fate.
What does a grand story about human obsession and revenge have to do with the science of pesticide use? On the face of it, nothing at all, and the link has been downplayed by Carson’s biographers. Nonetheless, I am sure that one tale did lead to a world-changing other. It is in the emotional content that the debt to Moby Dick lies. This says a little bit about how books work and how one book can lead to another—and a whole lot more about the subtle ways in which our lives can be influenced by them.
On May 27, 1907, Rachel Louise Carson was born on a sixty-five-acre farm on a hill just up the Allegheny River from Pittsburgh. Her father was an insurance salesperson, but her mother seems to have had the greater influence on her life. A former schoolteacher (and before that a singer), she gently instilled in her daughter a passion for nature and the outdoors, aided by Anna Botsford Comstock’s Handbook of Nature Study, the surrounding lush woods and waterways all of which combined to become her classroom. She once wrote in The Saturday Review of Literature that she had taught her daughter “as a tiny child joy in the out-of-doors and the lore of birds, insects, and residents of streams and ponds.”
As a child, Rachel loved reading, and she began writing stories (often involving animals) at age eight. Her first foray into publishing, at the tender age of ten, was with a story printed in Saint Nicholas magazine, a monthly that included among its contributors authors Louisa May Alcott, Frances Hodgson Burnett, Mark Twain, Laura E. Richards, and Joel Chandler Harris.
An early favorite seam of reading was Beatrix Potter’s tales of rabbit families, but these were later followed by the novels of Gene Stratton-Porter, herself an early nature campaigner, especially on behalf of birds, while in her teen years the sea was a common thread brought alive in the novels of Herman Melville, Joseph Conrad, and Robert Louis Stevenson.
At college, Carson originally opted to study English, but with the encouragement of biology professor Mary Scott Skinker (and this despite the fact that career opportunities for women in the sciences were extremely rare at that time), she soon switched to biology, eventually earning a master’s degree in zoology. Despite initial concerns that, in her new field, she would have to give up writing, Carson discovered that the new focus actually gave her “something to write about” (as Linda Lear notes in her autobiography Rachel Carson [1997, 80], referencing correspondence by Carson. Indeed, Lear uses the phrase as the title for the fourth chapter in the autobiography).
Carson might have continued working toward a doctorate, but in 1934, at the height of the Great Depression in the United States, she was forced to abandon her studies in order to seek a full-time teaching position to help support her family. And then, in 1935, her father died suddenly, leaving the family in financial straits and Carson solely responsible for the care of her aging mother. It was thus more out of need than desire that she took what was originally supposed to be a very temporary position with the US Bureau of Fisheries, writing radio copy for a series of weekly educational broadcasts about water life entitled Romance under the Waters. However, it would turn out to be a very fortuitous posting.
Her supervisor, Elmer Higgins, was an enthusiastic audience and thought the first pamphlet she wrote for them was more suitable for a magazine, saying, generously, that it was “too good” for the original purpose! He advised her to offer it to Atlantic Monthly instead, who in due course published it as “Undersea,” a vivid narrative of a journey along the ocean floor.
One of the readers of Atlantic Monthly was an editor at the publishing house Simon & Schuster, who promptly contacted Carson and asked if she could expand the essay into a book. This became in due course Under the Sea Wind (1941), which received excellent reviews even if it sold only modestly. In the meantime, Carson’s article writing expanded with features in Sun Magazine, Nature, and Collier’s.
And so, by 1948, Carson was working on material for a second book, a life history of the ocean. Chapters were serialized in various publications, including The New Yorker, and it was eventually published as The Sea around Us by Oxford University Press. Now Carson’s writing really took off. The book shot on to the New York Times best-seller list, where it remained for eighty-six weeks. It was serialized in abridged form by Reader’s Digest, and it won both the 1952 National Book Award for Nonfiction and the John Burroughs Medal. The Sea’s success led to the republication of Under the Sea Wind, which also became a best seller.
Carson herself became a minor celebrity and was inundated with demands to give talks and answer fan mail while she worked to convert the book into a documentary. This too was very successful, but Carson was unhappy at the editing of her work to make it suitable for the screen and from then on refused to sell film rights to her work. Nonetheless, unloved or not, the documentary proceeded to win the 1953 Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature.
Thus it was with the ground laid already that Carson turned her attention toward what would in due course be her legacy issue: the mass production and government-sponsored spraying of pesticides.
The result was that by the early years of the 1960s, Carson had already become famous for a series of books announcing that the natural world was under threat. Silent Spring in particular (the last book published in her lifetime) is a searing indictment of the threat to the natural ecological balance through such things as the overuse of pesticides and became one of the icons of the green movement in the United States in the 1960s.
Whereas most writers, up to then, much admired the new age of science, Carson instead described “the chemical barrage” as being as crude a weapon as the caveman’s club, hurled against a fabric of life that was on the one hand delicate and destructible and on the other miraculously tough, resilient, and capable of striking back in unexpected ways.
However, it was only after a CBS Reports TV special, “The Silent Spring of Rachel Carson,” aired on April 3, 1963, that pesticide use really became a major public issue. The program included segments of Carson herself reading from Silent Spring interwoven with interviews with a number of other experts, mostly critics, such as Robert White-Stevens, a former biochemist and assistant director of the Agricultural Research Division of American Cyanamid, who told the public, “If man were to follow the teachings of Miss Carson, we would return to the Dark Ages, and the insects and diseases and vermin would once again inherit the earth.” According to biographer Linda Lear, “In juxtaposition to the wild-eyed, loud-voiced Dr. Robert White-Stevens in white lab coat, Carson appeared anything but the hysterical alarmist that her critics contended.” Reactions from the estimated audience of ten to fifteen million were overwhelmingly positive.
If a million people had already read her book, fifteen million more saw the TV show. Among them was President Kennedy, who announced that the federal agencies were taking a closer look at the problem after being asked about pesticide use during a press conference. It was, all in all, a remarkable journey for a child who had grown up in a rural river town in Springdale, Pennsylvania.
A 1947 advertisement for DDT to control household insect pests. Well into the 1960s, when Rachel Carson’s book was published, most writers much admired the new age of science. Carson instead described “the chemical barrage” as being as crude a weapon as the caveman’s club. (Wikipedia Commons, “DDT Is Good for Me-e-e!,” July 30, 1947. Science History Institute, Philadelphia. https://digital.sciencehistory.org/works/1831ck18w.)
In some ways, it was the careful research behind Silent Spring that made her words carry weight, but it was also true that the book, published by Houghton Mifflin on September 27, 1962, arrived at exactly the right time in history, just as a new idealistic generation started to see science not only as a savior but also as a threat. Silent Spring, in particular, marked a turning point in the understanding of the interconnections between human activities and their environmental consequences.
Carson’s position in the book is that chemicals play a sinister but littlerecognized role, similar to that of nuclear radiation—in changing the very nature of life. She attributed the recent decline in bird populations—in her words, the “silencing of birds”—to pesticide overuse. This is where the title comes from; it was initially just the title for the chapter on birds. The year 1959 brought the “Great Cranberry Scandal”: when it was discovered that three consecutive harvests of US cranberries contained increasingly high levels of the herbicide aminotriazole. Since this was known to cause cancer in laboratory rats, the sale of all cranberry products was halted.
As it says in Silent Spring, “The sprays, dusts and aerosols are now applied almost universally to farms, gardens, forests and homes—nonselective chemicals that have the power to kill every insect, the good and the bad, to still the song of birds and the leaping of fish in the streams—to coat the leaves with a deadly film and to linger on in soil—all this, though the intended target may be only a few weeds or insects.”
SILENT SPRING
AUTHOR: RACHEL CARSON
PUBLISHED: 1962
Silent Spring opens with a dark fable of an imaginary town in the American heartland in which a blight has fallen upon the land, turning hillsides that formerly teemed with wildlife into silent landscapes of “brown and withered vegetation, as though swept through by fire.” There is only one clue as to what might have happened: “the residue of a white powder that had fallen from the sky like snow a few weeks before.”
In the chapters that follow, the book weaves together carefully researched evidence on the effects of pesticides with more colorful and literary descriptions. The tale of Clear Lake, north San Francisco, for example: Once a popular fishing spot, noted for the western or “swan” grebe, whose nest floated on the lake’s surface, it had been repeatedly sprayed with DDT and various other chemicals to reduce the numbers of gnats. After three applications of insecticide, the gnats were still there but the grebe were dying. Autopsies showed that fatty tissue in the birds contained levels of the insecticide many times higher than had ever been sprayed. What had happened is that the insecticide had concentrated a thousandfold as it rose up the food chain. The plankton absorbed and concentrated the initial dose, then the fish ate the plankton, and finally the birds ate the fish, with the level of the pesticide multiplying many times over at each stage.
On land too, Carson pointed out that the practice of planting large monocultures created the conditions for insect explosions and unraveled nature’s own systems of checks and balances. She gave the simple example of Dutch Elm disease, which spread through the United States and Canada largely because town planners liked to line streets with a single varietal of tree. And she put the problem into a wider economic context too, saying that “pest control” was doubly misguided as the most pressing problem for agriculture in the United States at the time was that it was producing too much food, resulting in surpluses that had been created at public expense via government subsidies that also had to be dealt with at public expense. In the United States, pesticides were a solution in search of a problem.
The chemical industry responded to Carson’s call for careful use of insecticides by denouncing the idea of a world without any chemicals—and sought their own emotionally charged examples in response, such as the plight of children dying from mosquito-borne illnesses in African villages. Ironically, though, the critics spread Carson’s message and created interest in her book without actually persuading key figures in authority.
Carson’s main argument was that pesticides have such disastrous effects on the environment that they should really be called biocides—poisons whose effects are rarely limited to the target pests. Most of Silent Spring is devoted to describing their deleterious effects on natural ecosystems, but later chapters also detail cases of human poisoning, cancer, and other illnesses attributed to the chemicals.
This was all in the context of a postwar world in which scientists were considered infallible, chemicals were our friends, and certainly the government’s guiding light was the health and safety of its citizens. It was uncontroversial that regulation of insecticide use was the responsibility of the Department of Agriculture—a department otherwise busy encouraging and funding exactly that . Back then, the Environmental Protection Agency did not yet exist, much less campaign groups like Greenpeace.So when Carson warned of a world in which birds had disappeared and “the spring was silent,” she gave a voice to those who previously had none.
Serialization of Silent Spring began in The New Yorker, in the June 16, 1962, issue—the first nonfiction book to ever be featured in the magazine. Carson and the others involved with the publication braced for fierce criticism. It was not long in coming.
Barely had the second installment appeared than Louis McLean, the general counsel of Velsicol chemical company (exclusive manufacturer of chlordane and heptachlor) wrote to say it would sue if The New Yorker printed the next installment. The magazine went ahead anyway. Soon after, widening the attack to oppose publication of the book itself, McLean stated that “sinister influences” and “natural food faddists” were seeking to create the impression that “all businesses are grasping and immoral” and to reduce American agriculture to “east-curtain parity,” meaning the level of the communist countries of Eastern Europe. Many conservative politicians of the period firmly believed that environmentalists were a kind of Trojan horse movement employed by the feared communist regimes of the Soviet sphere.
One of the main manufacturers of DDT (Dupont) was also among the first to react, compiling an extensive report on the book’s press coverage and estimated impact on public opinion as well as joining with other companies to produce a number of brochures and articles of their own promoting and defending pesticide use.
Two chemists associated with the company American Cyanamid, Robert White-Stevens (mentioned above) and Thomas Jukes, were among the most aggressive critics, especially of Carson’s analysis of DDT. They attacked Carson’s scientific credentials, because her training was in marine biology rather than biochemistry, as well as her personal character. White-Stevens labeled her “a fanatic defender of the cult of the balance of nature.” The snidest attack of all came from Ezra Taft Benso, a former secretary of agriculture who would later become prophet of the Mormon Church. He wondered why “a spinster with no children” should be so concerned about genetics before immediately offering his own answer: because she was a communist.
Yet the attacks failed. Indeed, they only made Carson more influential.
In conjunction with a new grassroots environmental movement, Silent Spring spurred a reversal in national policy with the creation of the US Environmental Protection Agency, tasked with identifying and evaluating the “environmental impacts” of government policies. When the EPA officially opened its doors on December 2, 1970, it had a budget of $1.4 billion and 5,800 employees, many of whom “had an enormous sense of purpose and excitement,” as the first EPA administrator, Bill Ruckelshaus, put it as part of an oral history interview with Chuck Elkins. In the same interview, Ruckelshaus paid tribute to Carson’s role, saying, “I would say in 1962, things changed significantly when Rachel Carson wrote her book entitled Silent Spring, because this introduced a new element into the public consciousness about pollution because she identified the fact that invisible pollutants—in this case, pesticides—might be having damaging and maybe even permanent effects on the environment, particularly on the survivability of species. And so this brought into the environmental movement a whole other set of people with different concerns and different demands that the government ought to be doing something.”
