I’ve been reading Rachel Carson’s biography this summer. It’s
the story of how a reserved yet ambitious scientist slowly embraced her role as
a national leader.
Rachel Carson was an award winning author years before Silent Spring’s arrival in 1962. Her
previous books and articles, some excerpted in the New Yorker, made her a household name. The nation wanted to hear
from her, and she was besieged with public speaking requests.
At first, she played it safe. Her speeches featured
descriptions of biological findings leavened with jokes about her awkward
transition from scientist to celebrity. But the more speaking she did, the
braver she became. Pretty soon she was tackling big questions about why science
matters and how that meaning should be shared.
Here she is in 1952 accepting an honorary doctorate of
letters from the Drexel Institute of Technology after publication of her book, The Sea Around Us.
“Scientists
are often accused of writing only for other scientists. They are even charged
with opposing any attempt to interpret their findings in language the layman
can understand. Literature is merely the expression of truth. And scientific
truth has power to improve our world only if it is expressed. You have given
your blessing to one of the most important functions of the writer today. This
is to describe and to interpret, for the average man, the world that lies about
us.”[1]
In a speech in 1954 to the thousand members of the Theta
Sigma Phi Matrix Committee, she went even further.
“I
am not afraid of being thought a sentimentalist when I stand here tonight and
tell you that I believe natural beauty has a necessary place in the spiritual
development of any individual or any society. I believe that whenever we
substitute something man-made and artificial for a natural feature of the
earth, we have retarded some part of man’s spiritual growth.”[2]
Before the speech, she had been afraid to talk about such things.
She needn’t have worried. The Matrix Committee told her it was the best speech
in their 30 year history. Gaining confidence, Rachel embraced a public voice
that melded scientific insight with conviction about what the world
should be. As we know now, that message, expressed in Silent Spring, changed the world.
Recent studies show why her approach worked. Put simply, she
talked about what mattered to people:
health, safety, security, fairness. And she did so with exactitude and calm.
During a TV interview for CBS filmed at the height of
controversy about Silent Spring,
Rachel was unflappable. The film shows her sitting in her living room, quietly
explaining her project:
“We’ve
heard the benefits of pesticides. We’ve heard a great deal about their safety,
but very little about the hazards, very little about the failures, the
inefficiencies and yet the public was being asked to accept these chemicals,
was being asked to acquiesce in their use, and did not have the whole picture,
so I set about to remedy the balance there.”[3]
One would never know that she was under attack for being a
hysterical alarmist.
Science communicators are seeing the value of this approach
when talking about climate change. Ten years ago, we focused on scare tactics,
making far flung projections about ice sheets and polar bears. Instead, we
should have brought the message home, spoken about people’s lives and values.
Rachel still has much to teach us.
Having grounded her message in the practical, Rachel closed
her CBS interview with a challenge we have yet to meet.
“We
still talk in terms of conquest. We still haven’t become mature enough to think
of ourselves as only a very tiny part of a vast and incredible universe. Now I
truly believe that we in this generation must come to terms with nature, and I
think we’re challenged, as mankind has never been challenged before, to prove
our maturity and our mastery, not of nature but of ourselves.”[4]
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