While trying to clean marble tiles that we want to re-use in our master bathroom remodel, I watched a PBS special on Rachel Carson. It scarily reminded me of what we are facing now with Donald Trump's denial of climate change, and what appears of his efforts to shut down scientific knowledge of the effects it will have on us and our (your) children behind us.
Silent Spring took Carson four years to complete. It meticulously described how DDT entered the food chain and accumulated in the fatty tissues of animals, including human beings, and caused cancer and genetic damage. A single application on a crop, she wrote, killed insects for weeks and months—not only the targeted insects but countless more—and remained toxic in the environment even after it was diluted by rainwater. Carson concluded that DDT and other pesticides had irrevocably harmed animals and had contaminated the world's food supply. The book's most haunting and famous chapter, "A Fable for Tomorrow," depicted a nameless American town where all life—from fish to birds to apple blossoms to human children—had been "silenced" by the insidious effects of DDT.
First serialized in The New Yorker in June 1962, the book alarmed readers across America and, not surprisingly, brought a howl of indignation from the chemical industry. "If man were to faithfully follow the teachings of Miss Carson," complained an executive of the American Cyanamid Company, "we would return to the Dark Ages, and the insects and diseases and vermin would once again inherit the earth." Monsanto published and distributed 5,000 copies of a brochure parodying Silent Spring entitled "The Desolate Year," relating the devastation and inconvenience of a world where famine, disease, and insects ran amok because chemical pesticides had been banned. Some of the attacks were more personal, questioning Carson's integrity and even her sanity.
This sounds surprisingly like the attacks today on scientists who say that climate change is real. It appears that one of the first actions of the Trump Administration was to remove all subject matter about climate change from the White House website and to start identifying those federally-employed scientists who have contributed to what we know about global warming.
Read the chapter of the Silent Spring, "A Fable for Tomorrow," and tell me that you aren't scared for our future. Watch the PBS documentary and tell me that you don't see parallels to what is going on now. Big money TRUMPS a healthy future for your children and grand children. I for one will sorely miss the robin's song and the polar bear's presence if we continue to deny the potential for devastation of our environment.
I'll get back to cleaning marble tiles for re-use. Those of you with children and grandchildren, think about it. Is this what you want to leave to them? Billionaire industrialists (and their children for perpetuity as soon as the "death tax" is abolished), but no bumble bees, hummingbirds, sloths, or even mosquitoes?
