Silencing the Songs of Spring

Posted on January 30th, 2007 filed in Environment, Gardening, Silence, Wales, Welsh Assembly

Imagine living in a world with no birds and no spring songs to enrich our lives and nourish our souls. A world where the fires of industry had burned all the trees and where the only sounds were artificial and anonymous sounds : a chorus of machines, rotating monotonously.

This weekend the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds organised their annual Big Garden Birdwatch, perhaps the biggest such birdwatching event in the world. This event offered many people an opportunity to ‘re-connect’ with their own natural environment.

We take our environment for granted at our peril. By our overuse of chemicals we risk losing not only our spring birds, but poisoning ourselves. This is a lesson that an American scientist and writer taught in her book Silent Spring (1962). Rachel Carson (1907-1964) was a marine biologist working for the US Government. She started investigating the use of pesticides after receiving a letter from the owner of a bird sanctuary that had been sprayed by the US Government.

Rachel Carson wrote about the abuse of chemicals and the perils they posed industrial society. She questioned the received wisdom of science, and faced a barrage of criticism and opposition from publishers, fellow scientists, and in particular, the corporations who profitted from society’s increasing over-reliance on chemicals.

The idea for the book title was taken from the poet John Keat’s La Belle Dame Sans Merci.

O WHAT can ail thee, knight-at-arms,
Alone and palely loitering?
The sedge has wither’d from the lake,
And no birds sing.

In her book Carson was able to communicate an ecology freed from the laboratory and her academic training as a scientist. It was a subversive ecology and her text is a seminal work for the environmental movement.

This brave woman’s voice helped shape a new consciousness as she challenged a materialistic, rational industrial society heading for self-destruction. In her book she concludes :

The “control of nature” is a phrase conceived in arrogance, born of the Neanderthal age of biology and philosophy, when it was supposed that nature exists for the convenience of man. . . . It is our alarming misfortune that so primitive a science has armed itself with the most modern and terrible weapons, and that in turning them against the insects it has also turned them against the earth. – last paragraph from Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962)

May 2007 is the Centenary of Rachel Carson’s birth. In Wales, as we go to the polls in May 2007 for the Welsh Assembly Elections, we may like to consider the legacy of this woman. If we value our environment and all that lives in it, then we should consider what our politicians stand for and vote accordingly.