SILENT SPRING

Post-COP26, when our awareness of environmental issues is cresting, it feels a fitting time to reflect on Rachel Carson’s seminal Silent Spring. Even more fitting that the Folio Society have decided to republish the text in a beautiful new illustrated edition, with additional essays.

Carson wrote her treatise against synthetic pesticides in 1962. Methodically, she presented the case that chemicals such as DDT were being applied indiscriminately across farmlands in the USA. Such chemicals were already asphyxiating pollinators and infiltrating human tissue.

She argued that killing an insect with DDT was a doomed endeavour, for synthetic insecticides were killing all insects, leaving only those with resistance, for which stronger chemicals would have to be developed.

Silent Spring did not just blow the lid on the pesticide industry. It awakened the wider environmental movement. Today, the opening chapter, in which a fictional arcadia suddenly withers into lifelessness is all too salient. ‘A grim spectre has crept upon us almost unnoticed, and this imagined tragedy may easily become a stark reality we all shall know,’ she wrote. ‘When the public protests … it is fed little tranquilising pills of halftruth. We urgently need an end to these false assurances, to the sugar-coating of unpalatable facts.’ Carson made these remarks long before an awareness that the fossil fuel industry was knowingly pedalling misinformation on climate change. But today we may still look to Silent Spring for guidance as we re-evaluate our place in nature.