Bittersweet environmental milestones
The worldwide environmental movement has just marked a couple of bittersweet milestones — the 50th anniversary of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring and the death of pioneering activist Barry Commoner, one of the fathers of the original Earth Day.
These milestones are bittersweet because both contain a lot to celebrate as well as to lament. It’s sad that Commoner has passed away, but he was 95 and had a full, influential life — as an environmentalist, he changed the world.
And while the world is better because Carson’s Silent Spring kick-started the environmental movement way back in1962, it’s poignant that we’re still fighting a lot of the same battles for clean air and water as back then — as well as some new, larger and more contentious ones.
Carson and her book are better known to Canadians, though Carson died of cancer shortly after it was first published. She was invited to testify before a parliamentary committee but was too ill to travel to Ottawa. Commoner, on the other hand went on to write and cajole, and quixotically run for U.S. president and lecture, including speaking to audiences in Canada.
The two had similar, complementary messages. We need to pay better attention to what we’re putting into the air and our water, or we’ll face terrible consequences.
“There was once a town in the heart of America where all life seemed to live in harmony with its surroundings,” Carson wrote.
“Then a strange blight crept over the area and everything began to change.” Everything died or got sick. The birds, the fish, the trees, the people. “The people had done it themselves.”
Commoner’s message about the environment was equally simple. He had four rules about ecology: Everything is connected to everything else. Everything must go somewhere. Nature knows best. There is no such thing as a free lunch.
Later, as the 1990s approached, he wrote about the need to measure whether the environment was getting better or worse. It was an important message, and remains so: if you don’t measure, you can’t tell whether the steps you’re taking to clean up are doing any good.
Commoner’s conclusion at the time was that by 1990, air and water were getting marginally better thanks to pollution controls and regulation; as the neo-conservative revolution took hold and the rules were relaxed, things were starting to get worse again.
The lives and the legacies of both Carson and Commoner hold important lessons for us today — especially right now i n Canada.
For one thing, in their times they faced intense and vitriolic hostility — and they didn’t bend. When Carson’s book came out, she was derided by the chemical industry as a crazy, hysterical “garden club woman,” a “peddler of fear” who knew little about science or progress. One company president called Carson “a fanatical defender of the cult of the balance of nature.” Carson was unmoved: “. . . all the life of the planet is interrelated. We have already gone very far in our abuse of this planet. Some awareness of this problem has been in the air but the ideas had to be crystallized, the facts had to be brought together in one place.”
Commoner picked up the banner after Carson died in 1964, his four rules and his activism helping to spawn and grow the modern environmental movement.
Both of them showed that the real hysteria came from their critics, not from them.
Indifference to hostility is an important lesson for environmentalists — especially in Canada right now.
In an era when the federal government guts environmental review, its environment minister more or less accuses environmentalists of money laundering, and Ottawa orders stepped-up tax audits of activist groups, it’s important to keep focused on the issues, not the vitriol.
“Otherwise you’re arguing about the money and not the environment,” is how one environmentalist put it recently.
The other lesson is to keep it simple. Environmental science can be incredibly complicated, but in the end, Commoner was right — everything is connected to everything else.
The third lesson, for Canadians, is to pay better attention to our own milestones. Canada’s environmental policies are getting a black eye from the world community right now, but as a country we have gotten a few things right over the years. We started Greenpeace. We’ve stopped poisoning our kids with leaded gas. We’re getting rid of coal-burning electricity in Ontario. And we listened to Carson about controlling pesticides. The environment is still a mess, but saying this is not what the legacy of Carson and Commoner are about. Both told us: sure it’s a mess, but we can make it better. We have Commoner to thank for reminding us how everything is connected. And Rachel Carson to thank for bringing us together around what may be the 21st century’s biggest idea — the environment.