A Compassionate World

Rachel Carson’s childhood homestead, Springdale, USA

I’m looking from the bedroom window of the late Rachel Carson, imagining what childhood eyes of one of the world’s great environmentalists may have seen. Gazing across the Allegheny valley toward the tree-covered hillside beyond, I could see two great chimney stacks reaching up from the coal-fired plants along the river basin. Was it this meeting point between countryside and industrialisation that caused the first awakenings in a young mind that would eventually go on to write a seminal work on the perils of taking an industrial approach to agriculture?

Rachel’s seminal book, Silent Spring, was the first major wake-up call about the perils of toxic pesticides; used in intensive farming to keep down insects, weeds and other pests. It was perhaps the opening salvo in the battle for the countryside; one of the earliest commentaries on industrialisation in food and farming that would lead to animals being incarcerated on factory farms and their feed grown in chemical-soaked fields elsewhere.

I started out in Pittsburgh, USA, on the start of my foray to find out how well we heeded Rachel’s warning.  Later that day, I was in Maryland, standing on the shore of the magnificent Chesapeake Bay, the estuary dwarfing the vast intricate steelwork of the Annapolis bridge that crosses it. As if by arrangement, a spectacular Osprey rose through the sky into sight. Brown turns to white as it banks, hovers briefly before folding wings and a powerful plunge sends droplets raining all around. A momentary pause before broad, fingered wings lift bird and fish from the surface and away with a shake. It’s hard to imagine that this tranquil place for people and animals is under threat.

That evening, I met the executive director of the Maryland Pesticide Network, Ruth Berlin. I wanted to find out what Rachel Carson meant to her and how Chesapeake is fairing today.

Ruth told me she saw Rachel as the ‘mother’ of the modern environmental movement. How her legacy had put the issue of pesticide use in agriculture firmly on the map. But has the problem been solved? “It’s probably a bigger problem now than 50 years ago,” she told me.

I heard how pesticides are being found widely in Chesapeake Bay, but that it’s a problem far from unique to this area. A cocktail of chemical pesticides is seen as contaminating drinking water, affecting wildlife and implicated in serious public health issues.

So Silent Spring brought the issue to the world’s attention. Half a century later, it’s still the subject of furious public debate. My next stop is Johns Hopkins University to learn more.  I’ll keep you posted…

Read previous posts from my Rachel Carson inspired journey here: ‘Maryland Muck‘, ‘World renowned bay under threat‘ and ‘A Peregrine mystery‘.