The Myth of Silent Spring: Remaking the Origins of American Environmentalism

Chad Montrie, The Myth of Silent Spring: Remaking the Origins of American Environmentalism (Oakland: University of California Press, 2018), 185 pp., $24.95.

Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, first published in 1962, is commonly identified as instrumental in raising the public’s awareness that humans can and have been negatively affecting the environment. In this book, Carson’s focus was primarily on pesticides, but the concern her work generated, the story goes, mobilized many to struggle against a range of environmental problems and in support of those affected. It is generally assumed that the publication of Silent Spring sparked the environmental movement in the United States.

Chad Montrie takes aim at this narrative. While acknowledging the importance of Carson and Silent Spring, he provides a concise but compelling argument that it is a myth since there were other forces and actors at play in the development of environmental concern, and they occurred earlier than the 1960s. Montrie argues that challenging the myth with this evidence “enables us to better see the full complexity of environmental problems today and empowers us to shape our activism accordingly” (22). Even if those outcomes are not realized, readers will gain a robust knowledge that makes the Silent Spring as origin story seem not just incorrect but disingenuous.

Industrialization receives the bulk of Montrie’s attention. By the eighteenth century, manufacturers were building dams for energy, a practice that expanded and included the dumping of waste in waterways, the latter joined by sewage from the increasing numbers of laborers in expanding cities. As disease and water supply and quality declined, farmers and concerned others attacked the dams and filed lawsuits against the companies responsible. These protests were met with state and federal laws that criminalized activities that would impinge upon manufacturing and “its supposedly superior contribution to the common good” (28). The valuation of the economy over the environment has largely continued and is certainly familiar to those involved in current struggles for environmental protection.

Members of labor movements and organized labor were also developing an environmental awareness. During the early through mid-nineteenth century, the establishment and use of parks and camps for workers and their families were becoming common. These gatherings were not just an escape from urban living but a way to develop solidarity (86-88). The Civilian Conservation Corps, established during FDR’s administration as a job creation program which included planting two billion trees and the improvement of parks, was headed by Robert Fechner, vice president of the American Federation of Labor and a leader of the International Association of Machinists (89). In 1962, the founding meeting of Students for a Democratic Society was held at a United Auto Workers camp in Port Huron, Michigan, resulting in the “Port Huron Statement” that outlined their agenda (98). These facts, and the other research Montrie presents, find no place in the Silent Spring myth.

Environmental concern in the United States was taking place at least a century before Carson’s book. And it was not limited to white, middle- and upper-class people, the groups who may find the loss of songbirds that Carson laments to be the catalyst for action. Montrie points out that the large environmental organizations that developed, such as the Sierra Club and National Audubon Society, were attracting the same population (64). The Silent Spring myth was an important component of what can be referred to as “mainstream environmentalism.” The narrow focus on non-human animals remains a source of criticism as most environmental organizations continued to struggle over including humans, particularly the more vulnerable, under their umbrella.

The myth fails to account for the environmental injustices that the indigenous, people of color, women, and the working class have faced and their involvement in the struggle for solutions. State and national parks were created by removing the people who lived there, if not first putting natives in costumes and on display for visitors. (58-9). Preferences were given to environmental use by the rich, such as by restricting access to hunting and fishing and wood harvesting, and by stocking game preferred by “sportsmen” (29). The white flight that increased the suburbs that were now threatened in Silent Spring left behind deteriorating cities bearing the brunt of environmental degradation (65). By the early 1970s, Olga Madar, the director of the newly created Department of Conservation and Resource Development and a member of the United Auto Workers International executive board was quoted in a pamphlet titled “Pollution is Not a ‘White Thing’” (109). The marginalized, though invisible in the myth, were quite aware of the problems and active in response to them. Settlement houses, such as Hull House, founded in 1889 in Chicago, addressed problems like garbage collection and sewage waste (75-7). The United Farm Workers Organizing Committee focused on the dangers of pesticides for their mostly poor Mexican and Filipino members (102-3). The recent struggle against water contamination in Flint, Michigan, illustrates the continuing interaction between minority groups and environmental injustices.

The Myth of Silent Spring is filled with many additional examples that support Montrie’s claims regarding the origins and complexity of environmentalism in the United States. Those interested in environmentalism and environmental justice, but also in labor and social movements, will find much to appreciate in this volume. That Montrie’s work reveals so much that was largely unknown or ignored, over the 50 years following the publication of Silent Spring, demonstrates both the value of the former and the power of the latter.

Even as Montrie is careful to note that definitions are critical in his dismantling of the myth, both “who counts as an ‘environmentalist’ and what counts as ‘environmentalism’” (18), at times the supporting evidence he provides seems to consider anyone who spends time in green spaces or appreciates that the environment is important for human and/or non-human life as having “an environmental sensibility” (19). This seems to qualify someone as an environmentalist and their thoughts and actions as they relate to the environment as environmentalism, even as Montrie also reveals evidence of more formal activities: e.g., protests, lawsuits, organizations. Montrie rightly criticizes this latter perspective on environmentalist and environmentalism for privileging the white, middle- and upper-class, members who have been telling the stories that created and sustain the myth. Montrie’s book provides an excellent alternative to those narrow accounts. But if we are as inclusive as Montrie allows, we could go further back in time than he does if we consider the relationship between the indigenous and the environment, in what became the United States and elsewhere. While cautious about avoiding the myth of the “ecologically noble savage,” ideas about the importance of the environment to life are central in many cultures whose histories can be counted in millennia. The problems of industrialization that shape much of Montrie’s narrative were not present for much of human history, of course, but concern about environmental sustainability certainly predates the burning of fossil fuels and machine technology; indeed, an environmental sensibility would likely have been even more common in humans whose lives were more clearly intertwined with the non-human world.

Finally, an aspect of the Silent Spring myth that I had hoped Montrie would address is the ethnocentrism that tends to equate the origins and operation of American environmentalism as the environmentalism. Montrie is clear that this manuscript is focused on the United States. However, it may be as common to exclude environmental concern and environmentalism in other parts of the world, particularly in the Global South, as it is to exclude those that he addresses in his book. We can hope that Montrie’s work will be part of a global search for an accurate history of our relationship with each other and our environment.

Kirk S. Lawrence
St. Joseph’s College, NY
klawrence@sjcny.edu