(5)--Silent Spring - Rachel Carson环境与资源保护法学.pdf

12Table of ContentsTitle PageTable of ContentsDedicationCopyrightEpigraphsAuthors NoteAcknowledgmentsIntroduction1.A Fable for Tomorrow2.The Obligation to Endure3.Elixirs of Death4.Surface Waters and Underground Seas5.Realms of the Soil6.Earths Green Mantle7.Needless Havoc8.And No Birds Sing9.Rivers of Death10.Indiscriminately from the Skies11.Beyond the Dreams of the Borgias12.The Human Price13.Through a Narrow Window14.One in Every Four15.Nature Fights Back16.The Rumblings of an Avalanche17.The Other RoadEnd Matter3List of Principal SourcesAfterwordIndexAbout the Author4To Albert Schweitzerwho saidMan has lost the capacity to foresee and to forestall.He will end by destroying the earth.5First Mariner Books edition 2002 Copyright 1962 by Rachel L.CarsonCopyright renewed 1990 by Roger ChristieIntroduction copyright 2002 by Linda LearAfterword copyright 2002 by Edward O.Wilson All rights reserved For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book,writeto Permissions,Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company,215 ParkAvenue South,New York,New York, Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.ISBN 0-618-25305-xISBN 0-618-24906-0(pbk.)Drawings by Lois and Louis Darling Portions of this book were first published as a series ofarticles in The New Yorker.eISBN 978-0-547-52762-8v2.09126The sedge is witherd from the lake,And no birds sing.KEATS*I am pessimistic about the human race because it is too ingenious for itsown good.Our approach to nature is to beat it into submission.We wouldstand a better chance of survival if we accommodated ourselves to thisplanet and viewed it appreciatively instead of skeptically and dictatorially.E.B.WHITE7Authors NoteI HAVE NOT WISHED to burden the text with footnotes but I realize that many ofmy readers will wish to pursue some of the subjects discussed.I have thereforeincluded a list of my principal sources of information,arranged by chapter andpage,in an appendix which will be found at the back of the book.R.C.8AcknowledgmentsIN A LETTER written in January 1958,Olga Owens Huckins told me of her ownbitter experience of a small world made lifeless,and so brought my attentionsharply back to a problem with which I had long been concerned.I then realizedI must write this book.During the years since then I have received help and encouragement from somany people that it is not possible to name them all here.Those who have freelyshared with me the fruits of many years experience and study represent a widevariety of government agencies in this and other countries,many universities andresearch institutions,and many professions.To all of them I express my deepestthanks for time and thought so generously given.In addition my special gratitude goes to those who took time to read portionsof the manuscript and to offer comment and criticism based on their own expertknowledge.Although the final responsibility for the accuracy and validity of thetext is mine,I could not have completed the book without the generous help ofthese specialists:L.G.Bartholomew,M.D.,of the Mayo Clinic,John J.Bieseleof the University of Texas,A.W.A.Brown of the University of Western Ontario,Morton S.Biskind,M.D.,of Westport,Connecticut,C.J.Briejr of the PlantProtection Service in Holland,Clarence Cottam of the Rob and Bessie WelderWildlife Foundation,George Crile,Jr.,M.D.,of the Cleveland Clinic,FrankEgler of Norfolk,Connecticut,Malcolm M.Hargraves,M.D.,of the MayoClinic,W.C.Hueper,M.D.,of the National Cancer Institute,C.J.Kerswill ofthe Fisheries Research Board of Canada,Olaus Murie of the Wilderness Society,A.D.Pickett of the Canada Department of Agriculture,Thomas G.Scott of theIllinois Natural History Survey,Charence Tarzwell of the Taft SanitaryEngineering Center,and George J.Wallace of Michigan State University.Every writer of a book based on many diverse facts owes much to the skill andhelpfulness of librarians.I owe such a debt to many,but especially to IdaK.Johnston of the Department of the Interior Library and to Thelma Robinson ofthe Library of the National Institutes of Health.As my editor,Paul Brooks has given steadfast encouragement over the yearsand has cheerfully accommodated his plans to postponements and delays.Forthis,and for his skilled editorial judgment,I am everlastingly grateful.I have had capable and devoted assistance in the enormous task of library9research from Dorothy Algire,Jeanne Davis,and Bette Haney Duff.And I couldnot possibly have completed the task,under circumstances sometimes difficult,except for the faithful help of my housekeeper,Ida Sprow.Finally,I must acknowledge our vast indebtedness to a host of people,manyof them unknown to me personally,who have nevertheless made the writing ofthis book seem worthwhile.These are the people who first spoke out against thereckless and irresponsible poisoning of the world that man shares with all othercreatures,and who are even now fighting the thousands of small battles that inthe end will bring victory for sanity and common sense in our accommodation tothe world that surrounds us.RACHEL CARSON10Introductionby Linda LearHEADLINES IN THE New York Times in July 1962 captured the nationalsentiment:Silent Spring is now noisy summer.In the few months between theNew Yorkers serialization of Silent Spring in June and its publication in bookform that September,Rachel Carsons alarm touched off a national debate on theuse of chemical pesticides,the responsibility of science,and the limits oftechnological progress.When Carson died barely eighteen months later in thespring of 1964,at the age of fifty-six,she had set in motion a course of eventsthat would result in a ban on the domestic production of DDT and the creation ofa grass-roots movement demanding protection of the environment through stateand federal regulation.Carsons writing initiated a transformation in therelationship between humans and the natural world and stirred an awakening ofpublic environmental consciousness.It is hard to remember the cultural climate that greeted Silent Spring and tounderstand the fury that was launched against its quietly determined author.Carsons thesis that we were subjecting ourselves to slow poisoning by themisuse of chemical pesticides that polluted the environment may seem likecommon currency now,but in 1962 Silent Spring contained the kernel of socialrevolution.Carson wrote at a time of new affluence and intense socialconformity.The cold war,with its climate of suspicion and intolerance,was atits zenith.The chemical industry,one of the chief beneficiaries of postwartechnology,was also one of the chief authors of the nations prosperity.DDTenabled the conquest of insect pests in agriculture and of ancient insect-bornedisease just as surely as the atomic bomb destroyed Amer icas military enemiesand dramatically altered the balance of power between humans and nature.Thepublic endowed chemists,at work in their starched white coats in remotelaboratories,with almost divine wisdom.The results of their labors were gildedwith the presumption of beneficence.In postwar America,science was god,andscience was male.Carson was an outsider who had never been part of the scientificestablishment,first because she was a woman but also because her chosen field,biology,was held in low esteem in the nuclear age.Her career path wasnontraditional;she had no academic affiliation,no institutional voice.She11deliberately wrote for the public rather than for a narrow scientific audience.Foranyone else,such independence would have been an enormous detriment.But bythe time Silent Spring was published,Carsons outsider status had become adistinct advantage.As the science establishment would discover,it wasimpossible to dismiss her.Rachel Carson first discovered nature in the company of her mother,a devotee ofthe nature study movement.She wandered the banks of the Allegheny River inthe pristine village of Springdale,Pennsylvania,just north of Pittsburgh,observing the wildlife and plants around her and particularly curious about thehabits of birds.Her childhood,though isolated by poverty and family turmoil,was not lonely.She loved to read and displayed an obvious talent for writing,publishing her firststory in a childrens literary magazine at the age of ten.By the time she enteredPennsylvania College for Women(now Chatham College),she had read widelyin the English Romantic tradition and had articulated a personal sense ofmission,her vision splendid.A dynamic female zoology professor expandedher intellectual horizons by urging her to take the daring step of majoring inbiology rather than English.In doing so,Carson discovered that science not onlyengaged her mind but gave her something to write about.She decided topursue a career in science,aware that in the 1930s there were few opportunitiesfor women.Scholarships allowed her to study at Woods Hole Biological Laboratory,where she fell in love with the sea,and at Johns Hopkins University,where shewas isolated,one of a handful of women in marine biology.She had no mentorsand no money to continue in graduate school after completing an M.A.inzoology in 1932.Along the way she worked as a laboratory assistant in theschool of public health,where she was lucky enough to receive some training inexperimental genetics.As employment opportunities in science dwindled,shebegan writing articles about the natural history of Chesapeake Bay for theBaltimore Sun.Although these were years of financial and emotional struggle,Carson realized that she did not have to choose between science and writing,thatshe had the talent to do both.From childhood on,Carson was interested in the long history of the earth,inits patterns and rhythms,its ancient seas,its evolving life forms.She was anecologistfascinated by intersections and connections but always aware of thewholebefore that perspective was accorded scholarly legitimacy.A fossil shell12she found while digging in the hills above the Allegheny as a little girl promptedquestions about the creatures of the oceans that had once covered the area.AtJohns Hopkins,an experiment with changes in the salinity of water in an eel tankprompted her to study the life cycle of those ancient fish that migrate fromcontinental rivers to the Sargasso Sea.The desire to understand the sea from anonhuman perspective led to her first book,Under the Sea-Wind,which featureda common sea bird,the sanderling,whose life cycle,driven by ancestralinstincts,the rhythms of the tides,and the search for food,involves an arduousjourney from Patagonia to the Arctic Circle.From the outset Carsonacknowledged her kinship with other forms of life and always wrote to impressthat relationship on her readers.Carson was confronted with the problem of environmental pollution at aformative period in her life.During her adolescence the second wave of theindustrial revolution was turning the Pittsburgh area into the iron and steelcapital of the Western world.The little town of Springdale,sandwiched betweentwo huge coal-fired electric plants,was transformed into a grimy wasteland,itsair fouled by chemical emissions,its river polluted by industrial waste.Carsoncould not wait to escape.She observed that the captains of industry took nonotice of the defilement of her hometown and no responsibility for it.Theexperience made her forever suspicious of promises of better living throughchemistry and of claims that technology would create a progressively brighterfuture.In 1936 Carson landed a job as a part-time writer of radio scripts on ocean lifefor the federal Bureau of Fisheries in Baltimore.By night she wrote freelancearticles for the Sun describing the pollution of the oyster beds of the Chesapeakeby industrial runoff;she urged changes in oyster seeding and dredging practicesand political regulation of the effluents pouring into the bay.She signed herarticles R.L.Carson,hoping that readers would assume that the writer wasmale and thus take her science seriously.A year later Carson became a junior aquatic biologist for the Bureau ofFisheries,one of only two professional women there,and began a slow butsteady advance through the ranks of the agency,which became the U.S.Fish andWildlife Service in 1939.Her literary talents were quickly recognized,and shewas assigned to edit other scientists field reports,a task she turned into anopportunity to broaden her scientific knowledge,deepen her connection withnature,and observe the making of science policy.By 1949 Carson was editor inchief of all the agencys publications,writing her own distinguished series on the13new U.S wildlife refuge system and participating in interagency conferences onthe latest developments in science and technology.Her government responsibilities slowed the pace of her own writing.It tookher ten years to synthesize the latest research on oceanography,but herperseverance paid off.She became an overnight literary celebrity when The SeaAround Us was first serialized in The New Yorker in 1951.The book won manyawards,including the National Book Award for nonfiction,and Carson waselected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters.She was lauded not onlyfor her scientific expertise and synthesis of wide-ranging material but also forher lyrical,poetic voice.The Sea Around Us and its best-selling successor,TheEdge of the Sea,made Rachel Carson the foremost science writer in America.She understood that there was a deep need for writers who could report on andinterpret the natural world.Readers around the world found comfort in her clearexplanations of complex science,her description of the creation of the seas,andher obvious love of the wonders of nature.Hers was a trusted voice in a worldriddled by uncertainty.Whenever she spoke in public,however,she took notice of ominous newtrends.Intoxicated with a sense of his own power,she wrote,mankindseems to be going farther and farther into more experiments for the destructionof himself and his world.Technology,she feared,was moving on a fastertrajectory than mankinds sense of moral responsibility.In 1945 she tried tointerest Readers Digest in the alarming evidence of environmental damage fromthe widespread use of the new synthetic chemical DDT and other long-lastingagricultural pesticides.By 1957 Carson believed that these chemicals werepotentially harmful to the long-term health of the whole biota.The pollution ofthe environment by the profligate use of toxic chemicals was the ultimate act ofhuman hubris,a product of ignorance and greed that she felt compelled to bearwitness against.She insisted that what science conceived and technology madepossible must first be judged for its safety and benefit to the whole stream oflife.There would be no peace for me,she wrote to a friend,if I kept silent.Silent Spring,the product of her unrest,deliberately challenged the wisdom of agovernment that allowed toxic chemicals to be put into the environment beforeknowing the long-term consequences of their use.Writing in language thateveryone could under