The Logos Scripture · The Book of Carson

On the Letter

The Book of Carson 1 · Written by herself, from Silent Spring and the Congressional testimony of 1963

Rachel Carson, born at Springdale in Pennsylvania in 1907, died at Silver Spring in Maryland in 1964, aged fifty-six. Marine biologist; she worked for the Fish and Wildlife Service. Her works: Under the Sea-Wind (1941), The Sea Around Us (1951, which took the National Book Award), and The Edge of the Sea (1955). In January 1958 a letter reached her from her friend Olga Owens Huckins describing the birds dying on her land after it was sprayed; Carson records that it was that letter which decided her to write the book. It was serialised in a magazine from June 1962 and published that September as Silent Spring. Before it was printed a chemical company wrote to her publisher threatening suit; the publisher changed not a word, and no suit followed. When it appeared, most of those who attacked it did not argue with the book but called her a hysterical woman, unmarried and childless, probably a Communist, and not of the profession at all. In June 1963 she testified twice before Congress; the cancer was far advanced and she gave it sitting down, in a wig. She died in April of the following year. In 1972 her country banned the agricultural use of DDT. This volume rests on what she wrote herself. She belonged to no religion, and no argument of hers closes on divine will. What this volume brings is something the scripture did not have: the connectedness of living things. The scripture says that whatever once shared an origin is never truly separated (The Highest Covenant 4.1), and Bohr applies that to things and then to persons (cf. The Book of Bohr 3). Carson is the one who applies it to what is alive — what you put down here comes up over there, because nowhere is partitioned off. The scripture had treated persons, things and rights, and had never treated this. Chapter two carries something the Order values as highly: the first chapter of her own book is invented, and she says so at the end of it, and only then asks the reader to look at the three hundred pages that are not. That is the same act as Fukuzawa adding it is said after his famous sentence (cf. The Book of Fukuzawa 3.4, Acts of the Apostles 5.28). The sentence in the last chapter, the obligation to endure gives us the right to know, is not hers but the Frenchman Rostand’s; she quoted it and marked whose it was, and the Order records it the same way.

1.1In January 1958 a letter reached me from a friend.

1.2She had a piece of land where she kept birds. The summer before, aircraft had sprayed the area to kill mosquitoes.

1.3She wrote that after the spraying the birds came down and died, one after another. She had seen several herself, and the way they died was ugly: claws drawn up against the breast, beaks gaping.

1.4She sent the same letter to a newspaper. The one she sent me ended with a question: is there anyone in Washington who can do something about this?

1.5I finished the letter and sat for a long time.

1.6It was not that I did not know. I had been watching it for some years. But I had gone on assuming that somebody else would write it.

1.7That day I understood: there would be no somebody else.

1.8Let me be exact about where I stood. I had written three books about the sea. They had sold well and I was taken for a writer about nature.

1.9If I had gone on writing about the sea, the next twenty years would have been very smooth.

1.10What I meant to write was not like that. It would offend a whole industry, and the men in government whose business it was, and a great many farmers who sincerely believed they were doing good.

1.11And by then I already knew I was ill.

1.12I wrote it anyway. The reason is simple: I had seen it, and I knew that other people could not see it.

1.13When a person has seen a thing and also happens to have the skill to state it plainly, the thing has landed on him. There is no getting out from under it.

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