The Social Vision of the Alternative Food Movement - The Oxford Topic of Food, Politics, and Society - page 533

Silent Spring had a major influence on the environmental movement, perhaps more
than any other single piece of environmental writing before or since. Silent Spring docu-
mented some of the harmful effects of the excessive spraying of chemical pesticides, and
it galvanized Americans into action. The celebration of the first Earth Day (1970), the
passage of the Clean Air Act (1970) and the Clean Water Act (1972), and the setting up of
the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) can all be attributed, in part, to the influ-
ence of Silent Spring .
Carson's environmental vision was not as directly hostile toward the alternative food
movement's vision as John Muir's was. Indeed, the first chapter of Silent Spring, “A Fable
for Tomorrow,” has a distinct fall-from-Eden quality to it, not unlike Wendell Berry's or
Vandana Shiva's portrayal of a bucolic agrarian past rudely disrupted by scientific and
technological progress. Because of this, Carson has often been appropriated by the alter-
native food movement. A more detailed reading of Silent Spring , however, shows how
misleading that is.
Carson was a scientist, and much of Silent Spring is a scientific argument about the
harmful effects of excessive chemical pesticide usage. The book is replete with scien-
tific data, quotes from scientists, and scientific reasoning. The concluding chapter, “The
Other Road,” lays out Carson's vision of an environmentally friendly system of agricul-
tural pest control—one that is radically different from that of the alternative food move-
ment. What Carson wanted was more, not less, science, to be brought to bear on the
problem of agricultural pest control. The entire concluding chapter of Silent Spring is
an impassioned plea to adopt new biology based technologies to replace chemical pes-
ticides. In a lecture, Carson remarked, “I criticize the present methods because they are
based on a rather low level of scientific thinking. We really are capable of much greater
sophistication in our solution of this problem” (quoted in Briggs 1987, 7).
Carson was not shy of science and technology driven projects to control agricultural
pests, so long as they avoided excessive use of chemical pesticides. For instance, one
project that she praised in Silent Spring involved irradiating huge numbers of insects:
The project involved the weekly production of about 50 million [radiation sterilized]
screw-worms in a specially constructed “fly factory,” the use of 20 light airplanes to
fly pre-arranged flight patterns, five to six hours daily, each plane carrying a thou-
sand paper cartons, each carton containing 200 to 400 irradiated flies. . . .
By the time the program was considered complete at the end of 17 months, 3 1/2
billion artificially reared, sterilized flies had been released over Florida and sections
of Georgia and Alabama. . . . Thereafter no trace of the screw-worm could be discov-
ered. Its extinction in the Southeast had been accomplished—a triumphant demon-
stration of the worth of scientific creativity, aided through basic research, persistence
and determination.
(Carson [1962] 2002, 281)
In addition, Carson also expressed praise for other such efforts:
A truly extraordinary variety of alternatives to the chemical control of insects is
available. Some are already in use and have achieved brilliant success. Others are in