From the editor's desk (excerpt)

Editor's Remarks

This September marked the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, a simple, thoughtful book, which is widely regarded as having launched the modern environmental movement. Carson’s primary concern was the damage done to many species of birds by DDT and other chemicals widely used for agricultural purposes; her title refers to the absence of music—birdsong—in modern forests. Her book is methodical, scientific, packed with evidence, elegiac, quietly outraged and, in places, poetic. There had been “nature writers” before Carson (Thoreau and John Muir, preeminently), but none was so controversial. Though Carson had been a best-selling writer before her 1962 book, which also flew off the shelves, she and it were attacked by the chemical industry. Her science was questioned, her basic premises challenged, she herself was accused of having Communist sympathies, and “studies” were published claiming catastrophic damage to human beings (starvation, deadly illnesses) if the agricultural sector ceased massive, widespread chemical spraying. Nonetheless, the scientific evidence, buttressed by the laborious field observations of naturalists, many of whom were birders, prevailed. The government passed laws restricting spraying (eventually banning the use of DDT entirely), and biologists began to devise other methods (crop rotating, employing natural enemies of destructive insects, sterilizing the males of the species) to preserve agricultural production. For the most part, Americans continued to have enough to eat, the chemical industry to earn profits, and bird and fish species such as salmon (endangered by pesticide-laced streams) to rebuild their numbers. [Continued in Confrontation 112]