I reread Rachel Carson's Silent Spring and her biography, Rachel Carson: A Witness for Nature by Linda
Lear, last summer after reading both an excerpt in the Globe & Mail from Maurice Strong’s newest book
“Where on Earth Are We Going?” and Patrick Luciani’s harsh review of Strong’s book in the National Post.
Strong is a western Canadian who started in the oil business. He turned around some small energy
companies and he became president of a major eastern holding company, the Power Corporation of
Canada, at the age of 35. He was Senior Advisor to a UN Secretary; Senior Advisor to a World Bank
President; Co-Chair of the Council of the World Economic Forum; member of Toyota's International
Advisory Board and Chair of Ontario Hydro.
Mr. Luciani is the Executive Director of the Donner Canadian Foundation, an organization that encourages
individual responsibility and private initiative to help Canadians solve their social and economic problems.
Mr. Luciani attempts to prove that the environment is in fine shape and he cites Carson for beginning a
tradition of writing environmental doomsday books.
Did Mr. Luciani ever read Silent Spring? What does he know of Carson? She could be the cover girl for the
Donner Canadian Foundation. Carson was the youngest of a poor, hardworking Presbyterian family. Her
family helped pay for her education at a Christian women's college and at Johns Hopkins University by
selling some of the family farm and doing extra work. Carson abandoned her dream of a PhD when it
became necessary to support her family. She held a salaried job until she became self-employed. She
championed privatization of public resources. She took on the US Fish and Wildlife Service and the US
Department of Agriculture. She exposed their negligence and incompetence to register pesticides properly
and to conduct ill-conceived insect eradication programs. She represents the triumph of the individual over
government and corporate establishments.
Silent Spring is a beautifully written book and a scientific treatise comprehensible to non-scientists. It
exposed bad environmental practices. Its impact was massive. After Silent Spring life for those who despoil
land, air and water has never been the same. And after Silent Spring, the public has learned to be skeptical
when told that the environment is being treated with due regard.
Carson is meticulous in her detail. She consults with credible authorities and she presents lower-cost,
environmentally benign alternatives to the spraying programs that she systematically criticized. Carson
prescribed what is now called integrated pest management - an approach requiring a thorough
understanding of a pest and its economic damage and ecology. Carson's work was difficult to challenge on
a scientific basis so Carson’s critics went after Carson, a tradition Mr. Luciani upheld. Personal attacks
aside, Carson fledged the environmental movement.
Since Carson's time environmental degradation has continued: the ozone layer is thinner, groundwater
levels are lower, surface water is more contaminated, smog episodes are more frequent, more coral reefs
are dead, more sites are radioactive, more landfills are leaching toxic ooze and more species have become
extinct. Although DDT use was banned in North America after Silent Spring, its manufacture for export and
use abroad continued. Annual global use of DDT rose after 1962, but not without consequence. DDT is
carried back and deposited in the Americas by stratospheric wind currents. Once back in North America, it
enters the food-web and can be found in the body tissues of certain North Americans in alarmingly high
concentrations. Silent Spring is among the most influential books of the twentieth century; it remains
essential reading for anyone interested in the environment. Don’t slag it ‘til you read it!