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A Life for Nature 

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The Gentle Subversive: Rachel Carson, Silent Spring, and the Rise of the Environmental Movement. Mark Hamilton Lytle. 2007. Oxford University Press, New York. 277 pp., hardbound. $23.

Cover of The Gentle SubversiveExactly 45 years after the publication of her environmental manifesto Silent Spring, this year Rachel Carson would have celebrated her 100th birthday. So it is a timely moment for the publication of this slim biography of a woman credited with inspiring the modern environmental movement with what she called her "poison book." The Gentle Subversive tells the story of Carson's life, from her youth as an aspiring author with a love of nature, through her years as a working biologist when few woman were, to the flourishing of her career as natural history writer, and finally as a crusader for environmental health.

Most people today know the name Rachel Carson—Time magazine listed her among the 100 most influential people of the 20th century—and, if they remember nothing else about her, recall that she had something to do with getting DDT banned. Of course, she is best known for her book Silent Spring, which seems to resonate even among those who can't name its author. It has never gone out of print and is a staple of environmental science reading lists. But I was surprised to learn that she was a best-selling author a decade before Silent Spring graced the New York Times' Best Sellers List for 31 weeks. In fact, her most successful book from a commercial point of view was The Sea Around Us, a lyrical and scientifically accurate exploration of oceans, from their creation to their creatures to our own dependence upon them. Her next book, The Edge of the Sea, took readers on an intimate tour of the ecology of shore habitats, and it too was a best seller.

With these books, Carson was among the first popularizers of the then relatively new science of ecology, with its focus on the interdependence of all life. She also promoted a biocentric view of nature, "informed by a Darwinian approach to evolution, in which humans were just another species, albeit a dangerous and often destructive one." At a time when most Americans believed nature was the enemy—and with new technology promising to defeat it once and for all—Carson was far ahead of her time. With the publication of Silent Spring, she was also on the wrong side of the corporate, government, and scientific establishments that were developing, promoting, and profiting from that technology.

Silent Spring was a departure for Carson, who was trained as a marine biologist and, until the financial success of The Sea Around Us, was a writer and biologist with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Carson devoted years to mastering the science behind synthetic herbicides and pesticides that had been used indiscriminately to kill weeds and bugs since the end of World War II, and she also tracked down the scientists and their research that bolstered her case against this chemical assault on nature that also threatened human health.

For all her careful explication of the science, Carson still wrote like a poet. Her title, Silent Spring, is both metaphor and prediction—and unforgettable. Her short introductory chapter, "A Fable for Tomorrow," is beautifully wrought, imagining a grim future in which the "voices of spring" have been silenced. "No witchcraft, no enemy action has silenced the rebirth of new life in this stricken world. The people had done it themselves."

When it was finally published in 1962, Silent Spring was enormously controversial—the Inconvenient Truth of its time. Carson was vilified by prominent scientists, politicians and government bureaucrats, and, of course, chemical companies. "Carson's critics attacked both her message and the messenger," writes Lytle, they accused her of everything from getting the science wrong to being a Communist. But ultimately she prevailed against "the establishment," attracting her own network of supporters and, although she did not live to see it (she died of cancer in 1964), new laws and regulations to protect people and the environment from the ill effects of "better living through chemistry." 

Or did she? As I was writing this review, the Los Angeles Times reported that a new study links the use of steroids to fatten cattle to fertility problems in the sons of women who ate a lot of beef during their pregnancy. And this is just one random example. Every day, it seems, there are reports of some deleterious effect on people or wildlife of some chemical or another. 

Author Mark Hamilton Lytle is a professor of history and environmental studies whose previous book, America's Uncivil Wars: The Sixties Era from Elvis to the Fall of Richard Nixon, explores the rise of new social movements, from environmentalism and feminism to consumer activism, during that turbulent time. So he also sets Carson and her influence in this wider historical context, noting that the modern environmental movement "…embodied her hopes for reconciliation between humans and nature." A hope that unfortunately remains unfulfilled.

—Susan Lumpkin

ZooGoer 3(3) 2007. Copyright 2007 Friends of the National Zoo. All rights reserved. 

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