The Myth of Silent Spring: Rethinking the Origins of American Environmentalism - Rilegato

Montrie, Chad

Rilegato

ISBN 10: 0520291336 ISBN 13: 9780520291331

Casa editrice: Univ of California Pr, 2018

Riassunto

Since its publication in 1962, Rachel Carson’s book Silent Spring has often been celebrated as the catalyst that sparked an American environmental movement. Yet environmental consciousness and environmental protest in some regions of the United States date back to the nineteenth century, with the advent of industrial manufacturing and the consequent growth of cities. As these changes transformed people's lives, ordinary Americans came to recognize the connections between economic exploitation, social inequality, and environmental problems. As the modern age dawned, they turned to labor unions, sportsmen’s clubs, racial and ethnic organizations, and community groups to respond to such threats accordingly. The Myth of Silent Spring tells this story. By challenging the canonical “songbirds and suburbs” interpretation associated with Carson and her work, the book gives readers a more accurate sense of the past and better prepares them for thinking and acting in the present.

Su questo libro

Informazioni sull?autore

Chad Montrie is Professor of History at the University of Massachusetts Lowell. He is the author of several books, including A People’s History of Environmentalism in the United States.

Dalla quarta di copertina

“The Myth of Silent Spring finds the origins of modern environmental consciousness in the history of the American worker—autoworker and farmworker, socialist and social worker, union rank-and-file and inner-city black—showing us a world not only unexplored, but largely unimagined by environmental historians. This book rewrites the history of environmentalism, infusing it with contemporary relevance.”—Richard W. Judd, author of Common Lands, Common People: The Origins of Conservation in Northern New England

“The Myth of Silent Spring successfully attacks the dominant narrative of the environmental movement’s origins. Importantly, author Chad Montrie deftly uncovers the pivotal importance of labor and the working class in environmental struggles since the late nineteenth century. His well-researched book deserves close attention by scholars, activists, and politicians alike.”—Elizabeth D. Blum, author of Love Canal Revisited: Race, Class, and Gender in Environmental Activism

“A much-needed synthesis of current scholarship on environmentalism ’from the bottom up’ Montrie introduces us to a whole host of forgotten working-class, Latino, African American, immigrant, and female green activists. In so doing, he shows us that environmentalism was always far more than simply a white suburban initiative.”—Colin Fisher, author of Urban Green: Nature, Recreation, and the Working Class in Industrial Chicago

 

Dal risvolto di copertina interno

“The Myth of Silent Spring finds the origins of modern environmental consciousness in the history of the American worker—autoworker and farmworker, socialist and social worker, union rank-and-file and inner-city black—showing us a world not only unexplored, but largely unimagined by environmental historians. This book rewrites the history of environmentalism, infusing it with contemporary relevance.”—Richard W. Judd, author of Common Lands, Common People: The Origins of Conservation in Northern New England

“The Myth of Silent Spring successfully attacks the dominant narrative of the environmental movement’s origins. Importantly, author Chad Montrie deftly uncovers the pivotal importance of labor and the working class in environmental struggles since the late nineteenth century. His well-researched book deserves close attention by scholars, activists, and politicians alike.”—Elizabeth D. Blum, author of Love Canal Revisited: Race, Class, and Gender in Environmental Activism

“A much-needed synthesis of current scholarship on environmentalism ’from the bottom up’ Montrie introduces us to a whole host of forgotten working-class, Latino, African American, immigrant, and female green activists. In so doing, he shows us that environmentalism was always far more than simply a white suburban initiative.”—Colin Fisher, author of Urban Green: Nature, Recreation, and the Working Class in Industrial Chicago

 

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The Myth of Silent Spring

Rethinking the Origins of American Environmentalism

By Chad Montrie

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

Copyright © 2018 The Regents of the University of California
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-520-29133-1

Contents

Acknowledgments, 
Introduction: "The Fight for a Balanced Environment and the Fight for Social Justice and Dignity Are Not Unrelated Struggles", 
1. "I Think Less of the Factory Than of My Native Dell", 
2. "Why Don't They Dump the Garbage on the Bully-Vards?", 
3. "Massive Mobilization for a Great Citizen Crusade", 
Conclusion: "They Keep Threatening Us with the Loss of Our Jobs", 
Notes, 
Further Reading, 
Index, 

CHAPTER 1

"I Think Less of the Factory Than of My Native Dell"

Perhaps to ease readers into the parade of difficult concepts and scientific formulas that fill the rest of the book, Rachel Carson began Silent Spring with a short fable. The setting was a town "in the heart of America," nestled among "a checkerboard of prosperous farms," a wondrous place where "all life seemed to live in harmony with its surroundings." Orchards bloomed white in the spring, forest trees blazed brilliant colors in the fall, wildflowers and ferns lined roadsides, foxes and deer roamed the land half hidden in morning mists, birds fed on berries and seeds, and streams full of trout ran cold and clear. Then one day everything started to sicken and die and the world went quiet. In the gutters, under the eaves, and between the shingles of the roofs was a white granular powder that had come from the sky some weeks before, falling "like snow." Carson left the powder (like the town) unnamed, but her modern telling of a biblical fall from grace was clearly both an explanation and a warning. "A grim specter has crept upon us almost unnoticed," she wrote, and "this imagined tragedy may easily become a stark reality we all shall know."

In Silent Spring's much longer second chapter that followed the fable Carson presented a history of how science had brought humanity to the brink of calamity. "Only within the moment of time represented by the present century," she noted, has our own species "acquired significant power to alter the nature of this world." And in the quarter century just passed this power had increased in magnitude and changed in character, reaching a whole new scale and acquiring a previously unconceivable potency. "The most alarming of all man's assaults upon the environment," Carson explained, "is the contamination of air, earth, rivers, and sea with dangerous and even lethal materials." The two most ominous were chemicals ("sprayed on croplands or forests or gardens") and radiation ("released through nuclear explosions into the air"). Both were legacies of World War II, the one greatly aided by chemical weapons research and the other a product of atomic and nuclear weapons testing. Together they posed an unprecedented threat to the "adjustment" and "balance" that life had reached with its surroundings over hundreds of millions of years. "The rapidity of change and the speed with which new situations are created," Carson pointed out, "follow the impetuous and heedless pace of man rather than the deliberate pace of nature."

There is, of course, some truth in these initial observations and claims. By the time Rachel Caron sat down to write what was going to be her third and last book, human ingenuity had indeed managed to introduce a whole new set of environmental threats to our well-being and safety (ironically in the name of feeding and protecting us), and people were only just beginning to become aware of how serious those particular threats might be. Yet by opening Silent Spring the way she did, casting ruinous environmental change as a uniquely mid-twentieth-century phenomenon, Carson misinterpreted history, relying on an inventive portrait of the past to make her jeremiad seem even more timely and necessary (as any compelling jeremiad has to be). Apparently this was convincing, persuading many that the book had an importance that went beyond its summary of the dangers pesticides posed and inspiring them to proclaim that Silent Spring was the "start of it all" — even though they were slightly, if not significantly, mistaken. Profound environmental transformation by humankind was hardly new. Different human cultures in various places had been causing "changes on the land" for eons, doing what virtually defines us as a species. And the particular problems that gave rise to a modern American environmental movement began more than a century earlier (at least), with the onset of industrialization and its many attendant consequences.

The first mills and factories in the United States, built in the decades prior to the Civil War, disturbed the ecology of agrarian life in various ways, namely by erecting ever-higher permanent dams on local streams and rivers and filling those same waterways with all manner of filth. The dams were necessary to harness water power that turned intricate belt systems hooked up to machines, but the mill ponds they created flooded river meadows that farmers used to feed their cattle, while the actual structures blocked migratory fish that many relied on as a food source. In decades past, most grain mill and sawmill operators lowered their dams or raised passage gates at different times of the year to let freshets through and allow rich silt to nourish meadow grass, and if the gates were not sufficient they constructed "fishways" to allow alewife, shad, salmon, and other anadromous fish to pass upstream. Textile mills and other manufacturers did not operate their dams in this manner, however, and they caused additional problems by daily dumping millions of gallons of noxious waste into streams and rivers. There it mixed with untreated sewage and other household waste from residents in growing cities, the places where new industrial workers came to live. As a result, by the end of the nineteenth century many waterways were not only blocked but also profoundly unsightly, terribly smelly, and, because they were often the source of water for drinking and other domestic uses, the likely cause of regular, deadly epidemics.

Responses to the environmental harm done by manufacturing were wide-ranging, and they began what would become a tradition of popular environmental protest in the United States. Using a long-held right recognized under common law, some local farmers busted up offending milldams, at first without attempting to hide their deeds and eventually, as states passed new laws that made such destruction a criminal act, working under the cover of night. Ordinary country people and town dwellers filed lawsuits against corporations as well, drawing on a shared understanding of riparian law that allowed only certain "reasonable" use. Over the course of the nineteenth century, however, courts and state legislatures sided more and more often with private industry, establishing manufacturing as the favored use for its supposedly superior contribution to the common good. Meanwhile, early public health advocates complemented the direct action and court challenges by creating city and state boards of health, justifying this new state intervention with an expansive interpretation of the natural rights enshrined by the American Revolution, one that included the guarantee of clean water and air. The boards collected statistics, oversaw municipal sanitation, and incrementally acquired powers to prevent or at least control pollution (which, by the early twentieth century, included smoke in the air as well as waste in waterways), yet they too were not infrequently blocked by influential industrial interests.

In fact, by the turn of the next century, most state and federal government involvement in regulating the environmental impact of industrialization bore the heavy imprint of America's hardening social divisions and unequal distribution of power. Newly created state and regional fish commissions did their part for fish restoration, propagating fish and restocking streams and rivers, but they focused less on species best suited as a food source and more on "game fishes" desired by "gentlemen anglers." Similarly, game commissions began to impose rules and regulations on hunting designed to please the ranks of elite sport hunters, usually at the expense of those who relied on game for subsistence and despite the fact that most communities already had well-understood and effective rules governing when and how they hunted and what they hunted for. This was the case with early forest conservation agencies as well, which stopped generally sustainable local harvesting of timber in order to maintain the timber resources needed to ensure corporate wealth and aid the country's incipient imperial aspirations. Meanwhile, those seeking to protect so-called wilderness from any human use relied on federal troops to remove and keep out Native Americans and white settlers from the first national parks. These and other uses of government power were grounded in a widespread belief among white elites that those among the lower social classes and assumed inferior races could not and would not reliably support efforts to protect wild areas, conserve natural resources, or reduce pollution. Subsequently, the drive to impose a narrow version of conservation and preservation in place of the "moral ecology" of common people set up an enduring conflict that was not settled for several more decades.

"NO GRASS, NO MANURE; NO MANURE, NO CATTLE; NO CATTLE, NO CROPS"

In 1708, the town of Billerica, Massachusetts, granted a mill privilege to Christopher Osgood, allowing him to construct a milldam at Billerica Falls, on the Concord River. Residents living upstream, in Concord and Sudbury, did not look kindly on this, since the structure interfered with their own use of the waterway and adjacent land, and they persuaded the commission of sewers to order Osgood to remove the dam. When he refused to do so, the aggrieved inhabitants petitioned the General Court in Boston, working under the assumption that any water use was supposed to allow water to flow "as it customarily flowed" and not do damage to others. "The Fish have been almost wholly Obstructed from passing up," they explained, "and a Great Quantity of their land Laid under Water." The court agreed with the commission and petitioners, and in 1722 the dam was either torn down or at least lowered far enough to keep the water from backing up on the distant farmers' meadows, and no new complaints were recorded. Presumably, the flooded land was what bothered the petitioners most, more than the way the dam impeded fish runs, and that was because the type of farming they did only worked if there was an ample source of meadow grass. Adapting the mixed husbandry of East Anglia, where the original Puritan settlers hailed from, eighteenth-century farmers cut hay to feed to cattle that made manure, which was used to maintain soil fertility in the fields, succinctly described in a common saying, "No grass, no manure; no manure, no cattle; no cattle, no crops." Obstructions on local waterways that were high enough and kept in place year round interfered with summer mowing, disrupting the cycle.

What makes the dispute about Osgood's dam particularly interesting is that it shows how eighteenth-century farmers believed they had the law on their side — which they did. For a while, they even had the right to remove obstructions themselves. If a dam was seen as a common nuisance, the Massachusetts supreme court had ruled that "any individual of their private authority might tear it down at any season." So in 1799, after Joseph Ruggle raised his milldam on a stream that ran into the Connecticut River, in the western part of the state, flooding fifty acres of land, Elijah Boardman and some of his friends ripped out the new upper portion. Decades later, this was still common practice. In 1827, Oliver Mosley and a dozen others tore down Horace White's milldam on the Agawam River, near Plymouth. Farther north, in the lakes region of New Hampshire, dam breaking was even more widespread, and because the legislature there was slower to outlaw the practice, it went on for much longer. Tensions were probably at their highest at midcentury, as Boston investors gained control over the state's largest lakes and systematically dammed the outflowing rivers, to ensure adequate water flow to their factories downstream in Lowell and Lawrence. In one case, in 1859, when the dam at Folsom Falls in Lake Village caused his land to flood, George Young took an iron bar to the structure, though without much effect. He returned with a group of men and they proceeded to pull off planks until company agents forcibly stopped them. After nightfall, fifty local farmers came back with a sheriff, who arrested the agents for assault and battery while the crowd went at the dam again, "with axes and bars," although again without success. Considering the difficulty of simple dismantlement, when another aggrieved group wanted to take down the Amoskeag Manufacturing Company's dam in Manchester, on the Merrimack River, they tried to blow it up, but a watchman found the flask of gunpowder and disconnected the fuse.

Eventually, as the industrial revolution swept across New England, legislatures and courts remade riparian (water) law to favor corporate manufacturers over any other users. At first in Massachusetts, legislators attempted to resolve conflicts between farmers and milldam operators with "mill acts," which provided for juries to determine compensation to landowners when a dam flooded meadows and fields. The law they passed in 1796 took away the right of dam breaking and made compensation the exclusive remedy, capped the damages, allowed for an annual adjustment of the amount, and meanwhile permitted the obstruction to remain, making mill owners tenants of flooded land on very favorable terms. Several times during the next century, as large textile mills, paper manufacturers, tanneries, and machine shops replaced small carding mills, sawmills, and gristmills, the state supreme court endorsed this accommodation on water rights. "In consideration of the advantage to the public to be derived from the establishment and maintenance of mills," Chief Justice Samuel Shaw declared in 1851, "the owner of the land shall not have an action for their necessary consequential damage against the mill owner, to compel him to ... destroy or reduce his head of water."

Two years later, in a case before the Massachusetts state supreme court, the Essex Company argued that its act of incorporation allowed it to ignore a county requirement to maintain a fishway on their huge dam in Lawrence and, more generally, to damage private property by eminent domain, claiming that textile manufacturing was a greater public use than any other. The justices agreed. Similarly, in New Hampshire in 1868, the legislature finally passed a mill act of its own that effectively transferred control over rivers and streams to private corporations. The law empowered the supreme court to appoint a committee to investigate damage claims, and if the committee determined the obstruction to be "of public use or benefits to the people of this state," it would estimate the amount for compensation while flooded land stayed under water.

Industrialization was advancing at such a rapid pace in New England that by the time the famed Concord native Henry David Thoreau hopped in a boat with his brother John for an excursion down the Concord River, just before midcentury, he could already see plenty of evidence that a profound transformation of the natural landscape was taking place. There was a new dam at Billerica Falls, three feet higher than the one Osgood built a hundred years before, intended to divert water into the newly constructed Middlesex Canal, flooding upstream meadows for many miles. There were also numerous textile mills, an iron works, a leather tannery, and other manufacturing along the banks downstream from that point, with dams at Massic Falls and Middlesex Falls, all the way to the confluence with the Merrimack River in Lowell. And one more register of the larger change under way, an environmental consequence of industrialization, was the nearly complete lack of anadromous fish. "Salmon, shad, and Alewives were formerly abundant here," Thoreau later wrote in a book about the trip, "taken in weirs by the Indians, who taught this method to the whites, by whom they were used as food and as manure, until the dam, and afterward the canal at Billerica, and the factories at Lowell, put an end to their migration hitherafterward." There were more dams, they were bigger, they were no longer left open for the seasonal migration, and fishways were not properly constructed. "Poor shad," he bemoaned, "Where is thy redress?" In this moment of transition there seemed to be not much anyone could do, although Thoreau (like many of his neighbors) knew this was not always the case. "I for one am with thee," he declared, "and who knows what may avail a crow-bar against that Billerica dam?"

"LIKE A PRISONED BIRD"

For those coming to work in the new mills and factories from homesteads in the distant countryside, the environmental change happening along New England waterways was shocking, while the new life they led also dramatically altered their own relationship with nature. Most of the first textile mill operatives were young, single women, sent off by their families to earn a cash wage. They were used to organizing their days according to natural rhythms: the rising and setting of the sun, the needs of livestock, as well as vagaries of weather and seasonal cycles, which determined what might be planted, harvested, gathered, picked, logged, tapped, or hunted. The labor was sometimes arduous and even monotonous, yet individual members of a farm family could often set their own pace, vary their activities through the day or week, and intermix meaningful interactions with a spouse, parents, siblings, neighbors, and others. They had a chance to be both indoors and outdoors as well, fishing for trout, collecting herbs, selling eggs, and doing other errands. In the mills, however, the workday was ordered by hourly bells and impersonal overseers. Indifferent machines established the work pace, labor was typically dull, repetitive, and unchanging throughout the year, and work rooms were often oppressively hot and noisy. When their day was done, operatives went home to crowded boarding houses or filthy tenement districts, with inadequate or nonexistent street cleaning and waste collection, seeing flowers, trees, and birds only when they walked on a town common, visited a "garden" cemetery, or took a trip away. "Nature" was no longer something the young women knew directly, through meaningful labor and normal family life, but as something apart from their ordinary existence, "out there," a place to encounter passively.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from The Myth of Silent Spring by Chad Montrie. Copyright © 2018 The Regents of the University of California. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Dettagli dell'edizione

• Editore: Univ of California Pr
• Data di pubblicazione: 2018
• Lingua: Inglese
• ISBN 10: 0520291336
• ISBN 13: 9780520291331
• Rilegatura: Copertina rigida
• Numero di pagine: 185
• Contatto del produttore: non disponibile
• Persona responsabile: non disponibile