The Woman Who Inspired the Environmental Movement
Rachel Carson started the fight, now it’s our turn to pick up the gloves.
In the early 1960s, Rachel Carson stood before Congress, ready to testify in defense of the natural world. Like today, nature was struggling to deal with an onslaught of manmade chemicals—something she had noticed through her work as a marine biologist.
Feeling bound by a “solemn obligation” to do what she could, she decided to stand against the might of the chemical companies whose products were killing the planet.
This wasn’t her first conflict with the chemical industry. After the release of her book Silent Spring a few years earlier, she was branded by them as hysterical, and subsequently threatened with lawsuits.
“Man is a part of nature, and his war against nature is inevitably a war against himself.”
The main message of Silent Spring was simple: humans are part of an ecosystem that is being damaged by the indiscriminate use of pesticides. As she so succinctly put it as part of the TV program “The Silent Spring of Rachel Carson,” “Man is a part of nature, and his war against nature is inevitably a war against himself.”
The chemical companies were so desperate to destroy her credibility, that they referred to her as a “communist sympathiser” and a “spinster with an affinity for cats.”
Carson was particularly opposed to the use of DDT — a very popular pesticide at the time. Groups such as the Competitive Institute in America still claim today that her “anti-DDT rhetoric contributed to malaria outbreaks.” A panel of scientists already agreed in 2009 that the use of DDT for this purpose should be greatly reduced and only used as a last resort.
Pesticides are still destroying the planet
Although Carson was against the indiscriminate use of pesticides, she understood that they might be necessary in some scenarios.
She was, however, a proponent of solutions that were less harmful. Solutions — such as pheromone traps, organic farming, or introducing pest predators—that still haven’t been implemented at scale, as ecosystems continue to collapse around us. 41% of all insect populations are in decline, with pesticides playing a major role in this.
According the Hilal Ever, the UN’s Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food from 2014–2020, it is a “myth” that we need pesticides to feed the world. She claims that chemical companies use “aggressive, unethical marketing tactics” and political lobbying to continue to sell their products. Ever also adds that pesticides are predominantly used for commodity crops, such as palm oil and soy.
Even so, our food systems are so inefficient that we use a significant proportion of pesticides in vein. On a worldwide scale, we waste one third of all food produced, meaning the pesticides used to grow this food were dumped into the environment for no one’s benefit but chemical company shareholders.
“Our food systems are so inefficient that we use a significant proportion of pesticides in vein.”
But it’s not only our food systems that are so wasteful. The United Nations Economic Commission for Europe says that 11% of pesticides are used for cotton farming, despite only using 3% of land. At the same time, only 12% of clothing is recycled globally.
Directly combating our wasteful behaviours is therefore a necessary part of reducing the spread of pesticides throughout our ecosystems.
The inspiration behind a global movement
The true success of Carson is that she managed to inspire a generation with her writing and brought environmental issues into the spotlight, making her one of many in a long list of women to do so.
When she testified before Congress she was suffering from breast cancer and had concealed the illness with a wig. Still, she managed to find the strength to fight, and in the process revealed that corporations will always prioritise profit over planet. In essence, she was anti-corporate interests before it was cool.
Over half a century later, pesticides continue to destroy the world around us. Not only are they not wholly necessary, many alternatives exist that don’t have such an enormous environmental impact. Fossil fuel companies attract a lot of attention for their role in the climate crisis, but chemical companies were also willing to partake in the spread of misinformation. Luckily, their attempts to tarnish Carson didn’t succeed. Thanks to her work, DDT was eventually banned in the USA and the Environmental Protection Agency was established.
Although Carson died shortly after the trial, her legacy lives on through the environmental movement. We have to keep fighting for a sustainable future, not only to honour her legacy, but to protect the natural world she loved so much.
