Lost Woods (26 page)

30

[1963]

The Pollution of Our Environment

IN EARLY 1963
Carson was invited to present the opening lecture to the Kaiser Foundation Hospitals and Permanente Medical Group in San Francisco at their annual symposium, but when the time neared for the October trip to the West Coast, Carson was debilitated from radiation treatment and frequently in pain. Nonetheless she made the trip, knowing that the symposium presented a unique opportunity to reach an influential audience.

Her official explanation for the cane she used to get on and off the stage was arthritis. The hushed and riveted audience of 1,500 physicians and health care providers did not seem to notice or care that she sat to deliver her hour-long lecture.

This was the first speech in which Carson publicly identified herself as an ecologist. Her message emphasized the links between species and their biological and physical environment, and the dynamic systems that govern the ecosystem.

There are reverberations of
Silent Spring
throughout this beautifully crafted speech, the last she gave. Carson expanded her criticism of a society that seldom evaluated the risks of new technology before it was entrenched into social systems. She also included a final warning against making the sea a dumping ground for the “poisonous garbage of the atomic age.”

[ … ]
I SUPPOSE
it is rather a new, and almost a humbling thought, and certainly one born of this atomic age, that man could be working against himself. In spite of our rather boastful talk about progress, and our pride in the gadgets of civilization, there is, I think, a growing suspicion – indeed, perhaps an uneasy certainty – that we have been sometimes a little too ingenious for our own good. In spite of the truly marvelous inventiveness of the human brain, we are beginning to wonder whether our power to change the face of nature should not have been tempered with wisdom for our own good, and with a greater sense of responsibility for the welfare of generations to come.

The subject of man’s relationship to his environment is one that has been uppermost in my own thoughts for many years. Contrary to the beliefs that seem often to guide our actions, man does not live apart from the world; he lives in the midst of a complex, dynamic interplay of physical, chemical, and biological forces, and between himself and this environment there are continuing, never-ending interactions. I thought a good deal about what I could say most usefully tonight on the subject assigned to me – “The Pollution of Our Environment.” Unfortunately, there is so much that could be said. I am afraid it is true that, since the beginning of time, man has been a most untidy animal. But in the earlier days this perhaps mattered less. When men were relatively few, their settlements were scattered; their industries undeveloped; but now pollution has become one of the most vital problems of our society. I don’t want to spend time tonight giving a catalog of all the various kinds of pollution that today defile our land, our air, and our waters. I know that this is an informed and intelligent audience, and I am sure all these facts are known to you. Instead, I would like to present a point of view about pollution – a point of view which seems to me a useful and necessary starting point for the control of an alarming situation. Since the concept of the environment and its relation to life will underlie everything I have to say (and indeed, I think it is central to this whole symposium), I should like in the beginning to remind you of some of the early history of this planet.

I should like to speak of that strange and seemingly hostile environment that, nevertheless, gave rise to an event possibly unique in our solar system: the origin of life. Of course, our thoughts on this must be speculative; but nevertheless there is fairly wide agreement among geologists, astronomers, geochemists, and biologists about the conditions that must have prevailed just before life appeared on earth. They were, of course, very different from those of the present day. Remember, for example, that the atmosphere probably contained no oxygen; and because of that there could be no protective layer of ozone in the upper atmosphere. As a result, the full energy of the sun’s ultraviolet rays must have fallen upon the sea; and there in the sea, as we know, there was an abundance of simple chemical compounds. These included carbon dioxide, methane, and ammonia, ready at hand for the complex series of combinations and syntheses that must have occurred. I shall not take time to describe the stages that presumably took place over long eons of time to produce, first, molecules capable of reproducing themselves; then some simple organisms, possibly resembling the viruses, and then doubtless much later organisms able to make their own food because of their possession of chlorophyll. Rather than stressing these details, I want to suggest two general thoughts: (1) So far as our present knowledge goes, nowhere else in the solar system have conditions equally hospitable to life occurred. This earth, then, presented an environment of extraordinary fitness; and life is a creation of that environment. (2) No sooner was life created than it began to act upon the environment. The early virus-like organisms must have rapidly reduced the supplies of nutrients adrift in that primitive ocean. But more important was the change that took place as soon as plants began the process of photosynthesis. A byproduct of this process was the release of oxygen into the atmosphere. And so, gradually, over the millions and billions of years, the nature of the atmosphere has changed; and the air that we breathe today, with its rich proportion of oxygen, is a creation of life.

As soon as oxygen was introduced into the atmosphere, an ozone layer began to form, high up; this shielded the earth from the fierce energy of the ultraviolet rays, and the energy needed for the creation of new life was withdrawn.

From all this we may generalize that, since the beginning of biological time, there has been the closest possible interdependence between the physical environment and the life it sustains. The conditions on the young earth produced life; life then at once modified the conditions of the earth, so that this single extraordinary act of spontaneous generation could not be repeated. In one form or another, action and interaction between life and its surroundings have been going on ever since.

This historic fact has, I think, more than academic significance. Once we accept it we see why we cannot with impunity make repeated assaults upon the environment as we now do. The serious student of earth history knows that neither life nor the physical world that supports it exists in little isolated compartments. On the contrary, he recognizes that extraordinary unity between organisms and the environment. For this reason he knows that harmful substances released into the environment return in time to create problems for mankind.

The branch of science that deals with these interrelations is Ecology; and it is from the viewpoint of an ecologist that I wish to consider our modern problems of pollution. To solve these problems, or even just to keep from being overwhelmed by them, we need, it is true, the services of many specialists, each concerned with some particular facet of pollution. But we also need to see the problem as a whole; to look beyond the immediate and single event of the introduction of a pollutant into the environment, and to trace the chain of events thus set into motion. We must never forget the wholeness of that relationship. We cannot think of the living organism alone; nor can we think of the physical environment as a separate entity. The two exist together, each acting on the other to form an ecological complex or an ecosystem.

There is nothing static about an ecosystem; something is always happening. Energy and materials are being received, transformed, given off. The living community maintains itself in a dynamic rather than a static balance. And yet these concepts, which sound so fundamental, are forgotten when we face the problem of disposing of the myriad wastes of our modern way of life. We behave, not like people guided by scientific knowledge, but more like the proverbial bad housekeeper who sweeps the dirt under the rug in the hope of getting it out of sight. We dump wastes of all kinds into our streams, with the object of having them carried away from our shores. We discharge the smoke and fumes of a million smokestacks and burning rubbish heaps into the atmosphere in the hope that the ocean of air is somehow vast enough to contain them. Now, even the sea has become a dumping ground, not only for assorted rubbish, but for the poisonous garbage of the atomic age. And this is done, I repeat, without recognition of the fact that introducing harmful substances into the environment is not a one-step process. It is changing the nature of the complex ecological system, and is changing it in ways that we usually do not foresee until it is too late.

This lack of foresight is one of the most serious complications, I think. I remember that Barry Commoner pointed out, in a masterful address to the Air Pollution Conference in Washington last winter, that we seldom if ever evaluate the risks associated with a new technological program before it is put into effect. We wait until the process has become embedded in a vast economic and political commitment, and then it is virtually impossible to alter it.

For example, surely it would have been possible to determine in the laboratory how detergents would behave once released into public water supplies; to foresee their nearly indestructible nature. Now, after years of use in every woman’s dishwasher and washing machine, the process of converting to “soft” detergents will be a long and a costly one.

So our approach to the whole problem is shot through with fallacies. We have persisted too long in the kind of thinking that may have been appropriate in the days of the pioneers, but is so no longer – the assumption that the rivers, the atmosphere, and the sea are vast enough to contain whatever we pour into them. I remember not long ago, I heard a supposedly able scientist, the director of one of our agricultural institutions, talk glibly about the “dilution of the pollution,” repeating this magical phrase as though it provided the answer to all our problems. It does not, for several reasons.

One reason, as I expect Dr. Brown will tell us tonight, is that there are entirely too many of us; and so our output of pollutants of all kinds has become prodigious. Another reason is the very dangerous nature of much of the present-day pollution. Substances that are highly capable of entering into biological reactions with living organisms. The third very important reason is that the pollutant seldom stays where we put it, and seldom remains in the form in which it was introduced.

Let us look at a few examples. The most serious problem related to modern synthetic pesticides, in my opinion, is the fact that they are becoming long-term, widespread contaminants of the environment. Some of them persist in soil for ten years or more, entering into what surely is one of the most complex and delicately balanced of all ecological systems. They have entered both surface and ground waters; they have been recovered not only from most of the major river systems but in the drinking water of many communities. Their importance as air contaminants is only beginning to be recognized. I remember this past summer there was a freak mishap in the State of Washington, which provided a rather dramatic illustration: a temperature inversion kept a very dangerous chemical, which was sprayed from the air, from settling on the crops that were being sprayed. Instead, the chemical remained in a drifting cloud for some hours and before the incident was over several cows had died of poisoning and some thirty people had been hospitalized. Then there was the incident in Long Island last winter, when several schools had to be closed because of dust from the potato fields – dust that was carrying insecticides and blowing through the screens of the school windows.