13.2.25 - on reading Silent Spring after the funeral

Last month, I went through US pre-clearance at Dublin Airport. Like every TSA agent I’ve ever met there, the one who processed my re-entry into US territory had all his terse security meanness diluted from time spent in Ireland. “How long will you be back in the motherland?” he asked genially. “Just a week. My uncle died.” He said he was sorry to hear that and then quipped, “It seems like people are just dying for the attention these days!” It was such a stupid joke that I laughed. “Maybe. He did die very suddenly.” As he took my picture, his tone softened. “He wasn’t even sick or anything?” “No,” I said, “He just died one day last week, with no warning. He wasn’t even 60.” The agent looked into the middle distance, which happened to be the bright horizon of the runway through a large window, and said with awed graveness, “I’m not even 60.” He had recovered by the time he handed back my passport, joking that he has so much life insurance that he’s worth more dead than alive. But the memory of it stuck out like a flash of sunlight in my exhausted haze of travelling. I laughed about it later with my family in Massachusetts, and on the phone with my partner back in Scotland. Imagine, I said. A TSA agent visibly reckoning with his own mortality in the course of scanning my passport. Imagine. The loss of my uncle rippling out so forcefully that a stranger found himself briefly awash in the shock of it.

The shock, of course, was there for me too when I arrived and Uncle Joe was not in his house with my aunt and cousin; an unreal absence after we had talked about him and thought about him so relentlessly. In the background, the TV droned from a muffled distance about fire: in one frame, the stuttering “ceasefire” of the Palestinian genocide coaxed out of Israel; in the next, the smouldering ruins in LA; between them all, the inflammatory ramblings of the incumbent president. In the unreality of death, this all felt unreal too. Time was two-faced; we still leaned toward the contours of what should have been happening as the disorienting fact of what was actually happening jolted us back with constant surprise: Uncle Joe should have been starting his new job that week. He should have been going with my other uncle to the vape store to start quitting cigarettes. He should have been seeing his son become a man, and fulfilling all the lifelong dreams that were just starting to line up for him. Instead, we went to the funeral home, and my aunt and cousin and Joe’s daughters and parents stood for three hours shaking hands with the constant stream of people come to mourn him. The next day, we followed his coffin to the cemetery, where he was buried not far from my grandmother (his mother-in-law), and a couple hours later we helped my aunt staple up plastic sheeting in the sunroom to prepare for the coming snow storm.

When I flew home the day of the inauguration, it didn’t feel like an inadvertent political statement so much as a mournful abandonment of these people I love and the grief we shared. On the plane, my restless leg syndrome jolted me from every longed-for drop into sleep, and my whole body buzzed with the suppressed panic of all this fast-moving loss. Not just the loss of my uncle, but the loss of the particular layout of my grandfather’s house from when my grandmother was still alive; the loss of the version of myself that only exists when I am with my family quoting Moonstruck at each other; the loss of Gaza as it was two years and fifty years and seventy-seven years ago, of the rights of queer and trans people to live safely in both countries I call home, of all my familiar digital landscapes ruined from tech bro fascism and enshittification, of any expectation that our lives can play out free from the contamination, displacement, and destruction wrought by capitalist-conjured climate collapse.

When I was in community college and co-president of the green club, Uncle Joe loaned me his copy of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring. It was the 1994 edition with the dark green cover, featuring an introduction from Al Gore. I have a vague memory of Joe telling me how it had spurred his own journey of environmentalism years before. He really admired Carson’s work and he wanted to share it with me, heartened by my own foray into student activism. But I was young, and Carson’s measured, poetic style did not offer me the quick-hit, sensationalised crusading that fit my attention span then. I returned the book unread, with a polite lie that I had enjoyed it. It would take another fifteen or so years before I was able to meet Carson through her earlier books, entranced by her hypnotic chronicles about ocean life. The universal awareness of Silent Spring made it easy to avoid ever properly reading it; why subject myself to a doom-filled read about long-banned DDT when I was daily anguished about the persisting tragedy of glyphosate and neonicotinoids?

Through the years, I assumed that one day I would get to talk with Joe about how grateful I was for the loan of Silent Spring then, even though I wasn’t ready for it. I thought I would get to mention that, in retrospect, the offering of Silent Spring at that point in my life was like a lighthouse guiding me toward the work I do now, and I would belatedly reciprocate his enthusiasm so we could discuss what Carson has meant to my work as a writer and his work in public health. I didn’t think about any of it this that hard, just occasionally when I saw Carson’s name, because no one expected Joe to die at 56.

In a coincidence that serves nobody at all, Carson also died aged 56. She died in Silver Spring, Maryland in April 1964, and some of her ashes are buried in Rockville, a mere five miles from the community college where I was co-president of the green club in 2008. I didn’t know this then; learning it now, it’s just one more chance connection I trod over ignorantly and repeatedly in my youth, along with the Rachel Carson National Wildlife Refuge that we passed on our annual family holidays to Wells, Maine. As I flew through the dark on inauguration night, bewildered by the vacuum left by Joe and nauseous with dread about the fascist horrors to come, I wondered if there was anything to be gained from reading Silent Spring now. Would I belatedly know Joe better for it? Would it offer any way to navigate the fear brewing thick in this moment?

Silent Spring was Carson’s fourth and final book, first serialised in the New Yorker in summer 1962, and then published by Houghton Mifflin in September. With mesmerising calm and patient, ordered prose, Carson laid out decades of scientific evidence from across North America detailing the disastrous effects of widely-used pesticides on terrestrial, aquatic, and human life. Though the primary subjects were chlorinated hydrocarbons (such as DDT) and organic phosphorous insecticides (like malathion and parathion), the true target of Silent Spring are the chemical companies and government agencies that not only failed to test the dangers of pesticides in their development, but failed to regulate their marketing and use by towns, farmers, foresters, and consumers who had no idea the extent of the harm they were exposed to through both casual and industrial application. Silent Spring triggered widespread public outrage, which led to the banning of DDT in the United States in 1972. But this was not without significant effort against the chemical companies who had much to gain from the continued sale of these weapons of mass destruction.

In retrospect, it is remarkable that Silent Spring prompted this sea change without ever directly blaming individual policy makers, administrations, or companies. Carson explicitly asks important questions about how these catastrophes were allowed to happen, and who is liable for making these decisions, but she doesn’t follow those questions down any meaningful or investigative path. Just puts them there to be picked up and carried on by others. Instead, her persuasion builds through storytelling: origin stories of how the world used to be, kindling deep wonder at the interconnectedness of species within their unique ecosystems, followed by the horrifying litany of many local and regional apocalypses that twisted these systems into death spirals, invariably, constantly, stupidly in the pursuit to eliminate a single species (the fire ant, the Japanese beetle, the gypsy moth, etc) or to cut corners in managing vegetation. Her primary argument, carried over and over, is that we deserve to live without the contamination of our bodies, food stuffs, and environments. Her exasperation is horribly familiar: “Have we fallen into a mesmerized state that makes us accept as inevitable that which is inferior or detrimental, as though having lost the will or the vision to demand that which is good?”

That which is good, as explained by Carson, is reliably achieved through simpler means. She repeatedly compares the many ham-fisted chemical disasters to case studies in which biological controls were employed by local governments with great success. These methods, she argues, are not simply more effective in managing diseases and pests that were inadvertently imported from elsewhere, but are vastly more affordable to employ, with no other environmental or public health fallouts. “Nature herself has met many of the problems that now beset us, and she has usually solved them in her own successful way.” Yet it is in these hopeful examples where I find the absence of Indigenous people and Indigenous land management to be the most glaring.

The history contained within Silent Spring is astonishingly shallow, dipping into the 19^th century only to demonstrate the influence of European scientists and immigrants. There is only one instance in which Carson references Indigenous American people: a 1961 case in which a community of Native Alaskans were found to be free from DDT and other pesticides, apart from individuals who had been admitted to the hospital in Anchorage and eaten hospital food which, like most food grown in the United States at the time, had been contaminated with DDT. It is this pesticide-free Indigenous region that Carson describes unironically as “a remote and primitive land, still lacking the amenities of civilization.” There is, potentially, some self-awareness of this discursive violence when Carson describes that at the hospital, “the ways of civilization prevailed,” and remarks, “For their brief stay in civilization the Eskimos [now a derogatory term] were rewarded with a taint of poison.” But her language ultimately leaves a vile taste in the mouth, and the absence of any other reference to Indigenous land relationships reveals the extent to which her perspective is fundamentally shaped by US imperialism. In her narrative, the role of Euromerican colonialism is consistently veiled behind the generalised term “man”: “As man proceeds towards his announced goal of the conquest of nature, he has written a depressing record of destruction, directed not only against the earth he inhabits but against the life that shares it with him.” Such a semantic function unjustly diffuses blame for what has predominantly been a white capitalist Euromerican crime.

In the final chapters, Carson presents the choice to stop using chemical pesticides as “the road less travelled”, quoting Robert Frost. That is to say, a world without widespread application of poison is considered radical and new (despite only having existed for a few decades at the time of Carson’s writing), and citizens must be persuaded into choosing this untested path rather than cling to the familiarity of constant contamination. But in contrast to her poetic snapshots of the land, which describe the beautiful complexity of natural systems free of chemical control, Carson argues our “road less travelled” lies in experimental bio-engineering, with genetically modified insects and crops presenting us with potential solutions that don’t require a radical change in our own behaviour. History in this post-war, pre-Civil Rights Act bubble of US imperialism is so shallow that non-chemical relationships with land must be imagined through the god-like tweaking of the world by white, male scientists. There is no “before” that Carson cares to draw from, no pre-1900 model of land relationship that fits the definition of “civilised”; there is only the gamble of fighting against these chemical companies and their corrupt entomologists, federal workers, and persuasive salespeople with a constant stream of new, lab-generated solutions.

Ultimately, this is the path that’s been taken in the 63 years since Silent Spring was published. The chemical companies continue to profit from manufactured fearfulness of insects and plants; the primary solutions employed by Euromerican governments continue to be greenwashed capitalist ventures focused on bio-engineering, gene modification, and good old fashioned lying; and history is still dangerously shallow, obscuring deep, enduring stories of reciprocal land relationships, of transness and queerness, of gift economies, of human and more-than-human migration, to further the distorted mythologies that want us to think this is the way it’s always been. Reading Silent Spring now, in these nauseating first weeks of the US administration’s openly fascist takeover, I am struck both by the way it speaks so directly to our current age and by how many times this current age has repeated itself within the last century. It is clarifying, even as it is horrifying, to remember that white supremacist, patriarchal, queerphobic, capitalist Euromerican history is an ouroboros, incapable of truly generating a different future because it wipes its memory clean every twenty years, transmuting everything that came before into myth and caricature.

If I had read Silent Spring before now, I might have come away from it with mixed emotions: awed by the skill of Carson’s writing, disappointed by the limitations imposed by her own racism, semi-despairing at how little the world has changed despite the book’s profound impact. But in this moment, where I am constantly holding my anguish at bay and muttering a one-sided conversation with Joe, I felt determined to find something useful in it that would coalesce all these feelings to a meaningful point.

First, I held onto Silent Spring’s enduring message on the importance of keeping records and preserving evidence. Carson did not herself conduct all the research that ultimately proved the lethality of DDT, but rather, did the hard labour of gathering decades’ worth of research conducted by others and gleaning inside information from her personal connections with government scientists. I found myself moved both by the sheer volume of research covered in Silent Spring (and the sometimes physical effects suffered by scientists in the course of understanding these synthetic chemicals), and by the emotional stamina it must have taken Carson to process, organise, and then communicate this grim body of evidence. It is hard enough to read the brisk transmission of disaster after disaster; I wonder at the strength it took Carson to keep looking such devastation in the face, and then to relay it all with such a calm, firm voice. The effects on her were not purely psychological; two years prior to Silent Spring’s publication, Carson was diagnosed with breast cancer, which makes reading her chapter on the specifics of cancer and pesticides all the more poignant. Weakened from radiation therapy, she knew that she would not have the energy to directly face the anticipated criticism upon Silent Spring’s release. In preparation, she and her agent worked behind the scenes to establish a large group of supporters who would take up the fight on her behalf. Of course, as they expected, there were cruel attempts to discredit her work and continued misinformation peddled by the pesticide industry. Monsanto, whose best-known product is the glyphosate weedkiller Roundup, published a parody of Silent Spring called The Desolate Year, which painted a dystopian future of famine and disease after the banning of pesticides. But ultimately, DDT was banned due in large part of Silent Spring’s mobilising effect. In our own time of rampant misinformation, the distortion of reality by generative AI, and the unrelenting displays of violence by current administrations, Silent Spring demonstrates the slow-burn power of deep looking: of standing as a witness to both the mundane and macroscopic world endings and, in the process, building a record that can support eventual justice.

Second, the centre of gravity in Silent Spring is not the outrage at pesticides’ uses or even the weight of so much diligently presented evidence; it is Carson’s fervent, resonant love for the earth. This love emerges in Carson’s descriptions of natural spaces and processes that begin many chapters, poetically painting a world that fills the reader with wonder. It vibrates in her repeated demonstrations that there are better ways to interact with the land. It shouts in her occasionally indignant questioning, lamenting the unnecessary and unremitting injury to creatures and landscapes that she knows are intimately connected to our own bodies. As I read her love, my own was howling. In these weeks since Joe died and current administrations have delivered on promised threats of violence, I have only loved everything that they hate more devotedly. I love my trans family and friends so much, so viscerally. I love my own queerness, and the queerness in others that has liberated me from the constraints of compulsive heterosexuality and gender norms. I love my fellow immigrants who are my friends and my community, and the immigrants who were my ancestors. I love the land: this garden I grow in Scotland, my mother’s and sister’s gardens in Massachusetts, the rolling ocean between us, the geese that fly honking overhead, the rising sap in the trees, the robin hunched territorially like Batman on the fence, the bats and the newts, the subterranean universe making soil. I love it all in a way that makes me giddy at being alive. I love it all so much that I would happily give up whatever needs given up to keep it all alive long after me. It is the love that drives my responses to the cruelty of these governments, not fear. It is the love which, when I give myself time to sit peacefully with it away from screens and anxiety, inoculates me against cynicism and despair. It is the love that I believe made Silent Spring so persuasive a text, carrying it through to us in the 21^st century.

And it is the love that makes the loss of Joe so shocking. Having finally finished Silent Spring, I only have more questions for him. I still don’t know how this book changed him when he first read it, or how it might have changed him to read it again after the decades spent working in public health took their toll. I still wish I could have belatedly shared his enthusiasm for Carson’s work, and told him that his generous offer to an unappreciative teenager was ultimately very gladly embraced. It aches in a bitter way that, much like the banning of DDT eight years after Carson’s death, so many good things sown by Joe in his life will grow without his living self to see them. But they grow regardless, sustaining his loved ones’ resistance to these times all the more determinedly.

Joe’s beautiful obituary, written by his daughter, unfortunately suffered from an administrative error that omitted the family’s request that, in lieu of flower, donations be made to Transhealth in Northampton, MA. If you are so moved, I know Joe would be grateful.

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Thanks so much to all the regular readers for your patience during this winter’s unplanned hiatus, and thanks so much to all the new subscribers who have shown up in the last couple months regardless! The usual twice-monthly programming will resume with the next newsletter, exploring what even is the point of front gardens in the UK and some lovely archaeobotanical bits and pieces.