IN LOVE WITH NATURE

THE FOREMOTHER OF ENVIRONMENTALISM, RACHEL CARSON WAS BOTH A PUBLIC INTELLECTUAL AND A PRIVATE WOMAN

Author: By Roger S. Gottlieb

Date: SUNDAY, September 21, 1997

Page: E1

Section: Books

Environmental historian Linda Lear traces Carson's path from a bright young girl in rural Pennsylvania, to a graduate student in biology, to director of the US Fish and Wildlife Service's publishing program, to internationally acclaimed nature writer and -- finally -- to a critic of unthinking and highly dangerous uses of science and technology.

While Carson helped initiate the modern environmental movement and remains by far the most widely recognized inspiration for professional environmentalists, she was a reserved and private person. Her closest emotional ties were with her mother, friends made through her work and -- most significantly -- a married woman with whom she shared a deep love for the last decade of her life. Ironically, since she once said she hadn't married for lack of time, she spent an enormous amount of energy selflessly caring for her mother, sister, nieces, and grand-nephew.

Carson was at once a writer in love with words and a scientific researcher in love with nature. Her advanced training and lucid, often poetic prose enabled her to make scientific issues accessible to the non-scientist and to write books that became instant bestsellers. ``Silent Spring,'' her last big undertaking, was a comprehensive and compelling challenge to the widespread use of pesticides and other environmental poisons.

Carson anticipated many of the ecological voices that have become familiar since her untimely death from cancer in 1964. She combined the traditional concern for wilderness of a Muir or Thoreau with an as current-as-last-month's-oil-spill focus on the long-term effects of toxic materials. This combination makes her a literary godmother to writers like Diane Ackerman, Sue Hubbell, John McPhee, and Bill McKibben. As a public intellectual quoted by President Kennedy, she testified before Congress and prompted some of the nation's earliest environmental protection laws. Thus her efforts helped forge the kind of citizen initiative that has been essential to later environmental victories. Philosophically, her passionate commitment to the intrinsic value of nonhuman nature anticipated the form of environmental ethics known as deep ecology.

Carson was the best-known public voice of a small but determined group of private citizens, naturalists, and scientists who resisted the deepening postwar connections between science and corporate interests. At the same time, she possessed a powerful spiritual vision. In her very last book, a simple evocation of the value of nature for children, she celebrated the infinite healing powers of the ``beauties and mysteries of life,'' a power derived from the ``recognition of something beyond the boundaries of human existence.'' In an earlier work, she offered an inspiringly non-theistic model of our place in the cosmos: ``Every living thing of the ocean, plant and animal alike, returns to the water at the end of its own life span the materials which had been temporarily assembled to form its body. Thus, individual elements are lost to view, only to reappear again and again in different incarnations in a kind of material immortality.''

Carson's spiritual view of nature involved a deep sense of moral responsibility. While writing ``Silent Spring'' she endured a host of acute illnesses, including a persistent and eventually fatal breast cancer. Part of her motivation to finish the book came from a feeling that if she had not done all she could in defense of both nature and human beings, she could ``never again listen happily to a thrush song.''

Lear has given us a meticulous, respectful, but curiously distant account. The book tells us everything we might want to know about the details of Carson's life, but not very much about what Lear thinks that life means. There is admiration aplenty, but little of the passion and intimacy that make for truly great biographies. Especially, the nature of Carson's love life and sexuality are treated with vague and brief euphemisms. In addition, the wealth of detail can itself feel like a drawback, too often creating a curiously flattened-out perspective. Carson's endless trips to wildlife refuges, her repetitive daily routine, the minutiae of every conference with agent or publisher -- all these get several times as much space as the development of her philosophy of nature.

Despite these limitations, ``Rachel Carson'' does raise some critical issues. There is, for instance, the significance of gender in Carson's life. She saw the biologist who was first her college mentor and later a close friend driven out of government research by a male chauvinist superior. Reviews of Carson's own books made countless references to her gender, appearance, and unmarried state, and to the ``paradox'' that she could be both ``feminine'' (short, well dressed, soft-spoken) and scientifically knowledgeable. One physician's review claimed that reading ``Silent Spring'' was like ``arguing with a woman,'' and a wisecrack made the rounds that asked why a childless spinster should worry about the effects of pesticides on human evolution.

We also find a now familiar tale of corporate and governmental collusion in defense of damaging environmental practices. Government reports were withheld from Carson. The bureaus responsible for indiscriminate pesticide use tried to evade her criticisms. A leading pesticide manufacturer attempted to stop publication of ``Silent Spring.'' Trade associations spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to greenwash pesticides and discredit Carson. She was called unprofessional, too emotional, a communist. (However, when 5 million dead fish poisoned by pesticide leaks clogged the Mississippi River and threatened water supplies in nearby towns, the counterattack died down a bit.)

Despite the public and governmental scrutiny the book drew to pesticides, the significance of ``Silent Spring'' has not diminished in the 35 years since its publication. According to Eric Chivian's ``Critical Condition: Human Health and the Environment,'' pesticides are still directly responsible for some 200,000 deaths a year around the world, mostly among the people handling them. In this country, they are regulated by an adversary system that gives enormous advantages to those who market them, and hence they continue to be present in our environment in concentrations whose dangers we have only begun to evaluate. Thankfully, however, many people throughout the world now feel as Carson did: that they can legitimately enjoy the earth only if they also do their best to defend it. In the end, Carson's insight that our wonder at nature must now go hand-in-hand with our protection of the environment may well be her most important legacy.