Reflections on Silent Spring
June 1, 2013
IN SILENT SPRING, her celebrated lament to an America destroyed by industrial conglomerates and the deployment of pesticides by the megagallon, Rachel Carson begins by quoting an ecologist by the name of Paul Shepard, who asks, “Who would want to live in a world which is just not quite fatal?”
Well, it is clearly better than living in a world that is actually fatal, and there are plenty of those around.
But why drive the environment to the limits of its endurance, pumping poisons into the skies and seas and soils, as the United States did and as China now does, if the only thing it does is further enrich a few psychopathic plutocrats?
But is that really the only thing it does? Carson would probably have little sympathy with the idea that industrialised agriculture is actually the only humane option for huge and overpopulated nations like India and China, or that industrial-grade chemical pesticides and fertilisers, not to mention intensive factory livestock farming backed up by the industrial use of hormones and antibiotics, are essential if the world is going to feed itself.
The argument from some of the more gloomy ecologists seems to be this: industrial farming of various kinds did not emerge as a solution to overpopulation, but was actually the cause of it, and because it is ultimately unsustainable, our species will sooner or later face a prolonged period of depopulation, whether we like it or not.
I tend generally to be in favour of technological solutions. This week, I interviewed an academic who believes all forms of economic growth are tainted and that technological solutions merely compound the problem. Environmental protection, he argues, is seen as just another source of investment or GDP growth. Thus, there is never a question of eliminating the original source of pollution: it is always a matter of coming up with expensive feats of science and engineering that will render the pollution harmless.
It was a very Heideggerian perspective. For purists like Heidegger, the idea that technology can be used to solve the problems caused by technology is a despicable one. If the underlying problems caused by the “technological age of Being” are to be untangled, the only genuine solution is to stop technology in its tracks. But if we’d followed such a nostrum at the time he made it, we’d have no internet and no DVDs, and I would probably be working 12 hours a day as a farm labourer in the boggy pastures of east Lancashire.
Technology is good, but it causes problems. Technology can solve those problems. This is how we have been living and progressing for centuries. Ideally, people like Rachel Carson play a crucial role in this dialectic, exposing problems that can then be addressed by writing such a passionate, celebrated work like Silent Spring.
