Sanctuary magazine

Editor's Column

Earth Shakers by John H. Mitchell

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At the exact moment of the 1989 San Francisco earthquake, someone here on the other side of the North American continent smashed into the rear end of my car as I was headed to an event in Boston. The car was rammed off the road into a ditch, but, resolute, after the requisite exchange of papers, I decided to forge on. I didn’t want to miss the occasion.

The event was an aftershock of another sort of earthquake. It was a celebration of the 80th birthday of Paul Brooks, who had been the editor in chief at Houghton Mifflin for twenty-five years. Many members of the old guard of the 1960s publishing and environmental movement were there that night, and there were many honoring speeches, and much raising of glasses, and jokes, and banter, and not a little seriousness.

Brooks himself had published a number of natural history and environmental books and essays. But perhaps his best work was behind-the-scenes. It was he who, against the odds, accepted a book idea for a field guide to birds by a virtually unknown bird painter named Roger Tory Peterson. It was also Paul Brooks who encouraged a modest peaceful nature lover and biologist named Rachel Carson, who had published three successful books on sea life, to jump into what turned out to be the forefront of the emerging environmental movement at the dawn of the sixties.

The book was Silent Spring and, as both Brooks and Carson expected, the work lit a veritable firestorm of criticism from the affected corporations. It also sparked the fire—more than any other single publication—of a host of activist environmental groups and governmental agencies, including some such as the Environmental Protection Agency that even today are under attack by corporate entities and politicians.

Carson knew all too well that she would be personally criticized, and even ridiculed and labeled incompetent as a result of the publication. Even though she had assembled a vast amount of scientifically irrefutable evidence on the poisoning of the earth, she was at first reluctant to write a full-length book. Not only that, concentrating on environmental destruction was the opposite of what she had done with her other books. The Sea Around Us, The Edge of the Sea, and Under the Sea-Wind were celebrations of life. Silent Spring was to be a diatribe against the indiscriminate application of chemicals of death.

And yet, Carson was above all a naturalist, an aficionado of all things wild and free, and after some fifteen years of research she had come to understand that unless the onslaught of chemicals aimed at the destruction of agricultural pests was curtailed everything she loved—including the 97 percent of beneficial or harmless insects and some of the brightest and best songsters of the bird world—would be sadly diminished, even driven to extinction.

She had attempted to publish magazine articles about the pesticide problem, but none of the journals she or her agent approached would dare to take on the subject. Paul Brooks was the only book publisher who saw the importance of the endeavor and encouraged her to carry on.

Houghton Mifflin had already published The Edge of the Sea, which had become, along with The Sea Around Us, a best seller, and Brooks, knowing Carson to be not only a fluid writer but also a tireless and accurate researcher, encouraged her all along the way and worked closely with her on drafts.

Silent Spring was published in 1962, after four years of writing. It appeared first in serial form in The New Yorker in June and was published in book form in September.

Everyone involved in the project expected trouble, but perhaps not the extreme reaction the book received. As Paul Brooks wrote in his own book about Rachel Carson, The House of Life, that, except perhaps for Darwin’s The Origin of the Species, no single book garnered as much vitriol as Silent Spring. Carson was immediately marginalized by some as a “little old lady in tennis shoes”—as all women conservationists of that era were termed. She was denounced as a “hysterical women,” and, after the corporation stiffs couldn’t dig out any juicy moral depravity with which to discredit her, she was termed “a nun of nature.”

Be that as it may, she and the book endured.

In the end, Paul Brooks suggested that the anger that pesticide companies, the Department of Agriculture, and the food industry leveled against her went far deeper. She had in effect struck at the arrogance of Western technological society, the ultimate hubris of the belief that human beings can control nature. 

                                                                                JHM