Fergus Finlay: Rachel Carson still has much to teach us — before it's too late

I’m going to be honest. That’s a slightly fanciful description of Tinahely. Mind you, a lot of it could apply. Not the orchards, but there are more oak trees now around Tinahely and Shillelagh and nearby Coollattin than in most of Ireland. Thousands have been replanted in recent years, after pretty savage deforestation in the ‘60s and ‘70s.

That whole countryside is a blaze of colour in spring and autumn, and often represents the things we value most in our rural landscape — and most take for granted. Tumbling hedges, random and beautiful willow trees, the “long acre” everywhere, and enormous fields of grain and grass that seem to stretch to the horizon.

I’m getting poetic now, but the original description of Tinahely you read above wasn’t written by me. In fact it wasn’t written about Tinahely or any Irish town, although most of it could have been. It’s taken from the very beginning of a book that was published 60 years ago this year.

I hope and expect that as we get closer to the actual anniversary of the publication, it will be remembered and celebrated again and again. Because it was one of the most important, and influential, non-fiction books ever written.

The book was called Silent Spring. It was written by a woman called Rachel Carson. She was dying from cancer when it was published, and only lived a couple of years after seeing it launched. And for most of that time, she had to fend off attacks from powerful vested interests, who wanted to see her work buried forever.

The vested interests were all in the huge and immensely powerful chemical industry, and especially in the manufacture of pesticides. The damage they did to the environment and to people and communities was the subject of Carson’s research and writing.

Her power came from both. Her research was meticulous — when the book was published she had added more than 50 pages of notes. Her writing was not just accessible, it was also powerful. In describing Tinahely I stole the paragraph about checkerboards of prosperous farms from the opening chapter of the book.

But that opening chapter, called 'A Fable For Tomorrow', describes a town — almost any town — in America. And after the loving description of its beauty, it goes on to talk about the evil spell that settles on the community. Cattle and sheep sicken and die. New and mysterious illnesses appear among the patients of the town’s medical practices. Birds are no longer to be seen, nor their voices heard. There are no bees, no pollination, no fruit.

But, she writes, “no witchcraft, no enemy action had silenced the rebirth of life in this stricken world. The people had done it themselves.” She is talking about the widespread and indiscriminate use of pesticides throughout American agriculture and horticulture, and especially DDT.

DDT had been around for a long time in one form or another, but in the latter part of the Second World War it became hugely popular as a way of protecting American troops against insect-borne diseases like malaria. After the war, it began to be manufactured in industrial quantities by companies like Monsanto, and its use became more and more widespread — and entirely unregulated. Virtually every crop grown on every farm was heavily treated with DDT. Until Silent Spring.

The power of Carson’s research and the lucidity of her writing led to the book becoming a huge bestseller. And, despite the powerful interests ranged against her, it changed everything. There are almost no countries in the world now that allow unregulated pesticides.

There was no environmental movement in the US or anywhere else in the world to speak of before Silent Spring was published.

Carson herself knew nothing about carbon emissions or climate change. Her primary concern was how the stuff we put in the ground alters the balance of nature.

She lit a flame with that book. She is the giant on whose shoulders today’s environmental leaders stand. A shy and retiring scientist, she never married and spent most of her short life battling illness and acting as the main breadwinner of a hard-pressed family. Her meticulous mind, searing passion, and captivating writing started a movement that may now be the thing that forces us to save our world.

We’ve a long way to go. How much longer will it be, for instance, before we get our carbon footprint under control? Here’s my own failure — or perhaps, one of the many things I have to change. When we got home from a lovely weekend in Shillelagh, I went to our local branch of a well-known German multiple and bought some more fruit and vegetables.

Some, though not all, of their potatoes are Irish – and all their turnips are Irish. But the rest of the produce — apples, courgettes, pears, green beans, celery — came from the UK, Italy, Spain, Ethiopia, and Morocco.  It’s staggering when you stop and look, isn’t it? And it’s one change we can make.

Although she had never studied that wider range of issues that were to have such an enormous impact on the environment, Rachel Carson got it. 

A little while before she died, she did an interview for a documentary  that was being made about the book. In it she said, “Man’s attitude toward nature is today critically  important simply because we have now acquired a fateful power to alter and destroy nature. But man is a part of nature, and his war against nature is inevitably a war against himself. We are challenged as mankind has never been challenged before to prove our maturity and our mastery, not of nature, but of ourselves.”

Sixty years later, the message is even more relevant. Despite all the evidence accumulated by the thousands of successors to that one brave scientist, we’re still not listening hard enough and acting urgently enough. 

As Rachel Carson said back then, it won’t be witchcraft or enemy action. If we don’t start to get it right soon, we will have caused the silent spring ourselves.