Routledge Handbook of Gender and Environment

Sherilyn MacGregor, Sherilyn MacGregor

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781134601608
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Economia
• Subtopic: Economia dello sviluppo

The Routledge Handbook of Gender and Environment gathers together state-of-the-art theoretical reflections and empirical research from leading researchers and practitioners working in this transdisciplinary and transnational academic field. Over the course of the book, these contributors provide critical analyses of the gender dimensions of a wide range of timely and challenging topics, from sustainable development and climate change politics, to queer ecology and interspecies ethics in the so-called Anthropocene.

Presenting a comprehensive overview of the development of the field from early political critiques of the male domination of women and nature in the 1980s to the sophisticated intersectional and inclusive analyses of the present, the volume is divided into four parts:

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• Part I: Foundations

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• Part II: Approaches

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• Part III: Politics, policy and practice

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• Part IV: Futures.

Comprising chapters written by forty contributors with different perspectives and working in a wide range of research contexts around the world, this Handbook will serve as a vital resource for scholars, students, and practitioners in environmental studies, gender studies, human geography, and the environmental humanities and social sciences more broadly.

Part I
Foundations

1
Rachel Carson was Right – then, and Now

Joni Seager

Introduction

The 1962 publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring is universally recognized as a watershed event in the history of modern environmentalism. This book is credited with launching modern environmental movements around the world, catalyzing bans in the United States and many other countries on DDT(dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane) and cognate pesticides (especially the organochlorines and organophosphates), and framing the first sustained exposé and critique of the depredations wrought by an uncritical embrace of the chemical age. Yet Silent Spring offered even more sweeping and radical critiques: of capitalism, productionism, militarism, and corporate control of government agendas. When Silent Spring was released, the pesticides narrative was so dominant, and Carson’s findings so shocking to most readers, that the larger socio-political critical position within which her pesticides findings were embedded went largely unremarked. A few contemporaneous critics muttered about her being a ‘communist’, but those seemed mostly to be knee-jerk denouncements, not cogent analyses. Mostly, her anti-capitalist and anti-militarist critiques have only received attention more recently, as the fiftieth anniversary of Silent Spring produced a renewed interest in the book.

Quite remarkably and patronizingly, some of the recent assessments of the sweepingly radical nature of Silent Spring suggest that Carson herself was not fully aware of her own analysis. For example, in the midst of an overwhelmingly laudatory review of the importance of Silent Spring, the former science editor for The Guardian suggests that Carson’s deeper socio-political critique was not intentionally formed by the author herself:

[Silent Spring] also – although this can hardly have been what she intended – a brilliant critique of free-market capitalism, in which chemical companies concerned only with the balance sheet could persuade government and big business to dust and spray the US mainland with costly, persistent and highly toxic products that bore minimal, and sometimes barely visible, warnings of risk to health; in which research into the consequences of chemical overkill was barely funded, if at all; and in which alternative approaches – among them, biological control – were dismissed because nobody (except perhaps the misinformed farmer and the trusting consumer) would profit from them.

(Radford 2011:n.p.)

An attentive reading of Silent Spring reveals otherwise; Carson knew exactly what she was doing. Long before it was hip to rage against the machine, Carson was raging (Seager 2014:24).

Rachel Carson’s broader political analysis in Silent Spring is framed by her proto-feminist environmental analysis. There is no evidence that she defined herself as a feminist; few people did in 1962. Nonetheless, Carson prefigures and points the way to the explicitly feminist analyses that would emerge in the 1980s and 1990s, among them:

• Her critique of the masculinized ‘control’ of nature, which she saw as the stalking horse for the chemical industry, is a stepping stone for later gender and environment analyses from feminist environmental scholars such as Carolyn Merchant (1980, 2008) and Vandana Shiva (1988; Mies and Shiva 1993).
• She drew attention to the manipulation of gender ideologies deployed to persuade Americans to embrace pesticides for domestic use.
• Carson embraced a subjective engagement with nature and, as a scientist, argued the necessity of incorporating humility and a sense of wonder into modern science. Building on this argument, she laid the groundwork for what would become the ‘precautionary principle’.
• Carson was one of the first environmental scientists to draw attention to the then uncertain but, in her view, foreboding indications of potent chemical hormone disruptions and impairment of nonhuman and human reproductive systems (Seager 2003).
• Her positionality as a woman in the natural sciences was never far out of view. This was particularly apparent in the response to Silent Spring. Even before the book was published, the major pesticide corporations rolled out a coordinated strategy of attacking Carson’s science and also attacking her personally through explicit misogyny. The attacks on Carson and Silent Spring have become a template for modern corporate denial strategies.

Raging against the machine

Prior to Silent Spring, Carson had made her reputation as a nature writer, with three books on the ocean environment and marine life. The second book, The Sea Around Us (1951), captured a wide popular readership and established Carson’s place in the pantheon of great nature observers. This book was on the New York Times bestseller list for almost 90 weeks, it won the US National Book Award, it was condensed in Reader’s Digest, and it made Carson a household name. The Sea Around Us also gave her the financial independence she needed to resign from her job as chief editor at the US Fish and Wildlife Service to devote herself full time to her writing. In 1955 she followed the success of The Sea Around Us with a study of the coastal Atlantic, The Edge of the Sea, the third of a trilogy ‘biography of the ocean’. By the time The Edge of the Sea was released, Carson was famous.

The explosive success of Silent Spring is partly explained by this prior reputation. Because Carson was already a household name and a trusted science writer, her 1962 book had an eager, pent-up readership. But her readership might not have been prepared for the new Rachel Carson. As an author known for books in the nature-appreciation genre, Carson had been associated with an appropriately womanly and genteel version of science. Silent Spring was as sharp a swerve away from genteel nature observation as one might imagine. An unflinching, unrelenting, measured critique of the modernist values emerging in post–World War II America and of the growing corporate control over social priorities and government policy, Silent Spring challenged the ascendant view that human progress depended on ever more powerful control over ‘nature’.

Her book was one of the first popularized critiques of what we might now call productionist values. Carson devotes considerable space in Silent Spring to debunking claims that the use of pesticides increases agricultural production. She was not the first to draw attention to insect resistance and ‘flareback’, but she was one of the first to bring this into public view. Once started, the process of developing and applying even more powerful chemicals spirals endlessly upward, driven by its own internal logic – and driven by the biological process of resistance. Insects, in what Carson called ‘a triumphant vindication of Darwin’s principle of the survival of the fittest’ (1967:18),¹ rapidly develop resistance to insecticides – thus, different and more powerful insecticides need to be applied, to which those insects will develop resistance. Carson documents case after case of the resurgence of insects following pesticide spraying – to which, again, even more spraying seems the only resort. Any initial increases in agricultural production, she argues, were illusory and unsustainable.

But Carson was not primarily concerned with charting a better course to increased production. She questioned whether increased agricultural production in the post-war United States was itself even a desirable goal:

How could intelligent beings seek to control a few unwanted species by a method that contaminated the entire environment and brought the threat of disease and death even to their own kind? Yet this is precisely what we have done. We have done it, moreover, for reasons that collapse the moment we examine them. We are told that the enormous and expanding use of pesticides is necessary to maintain farm production. Yet is our real problem not one of overproduction? Our farms… have yielded such a staggering excess of crops that the American taxpayer in 1962 is paying out more than one billion dollars a year as the total carrying cost of the surplus-food storage program.

(Carson 1967:19)

Carson’s concern about ‘productionism’ may have been influenced by her friendship with Robert Rudd, a scientist in California who was studying pesticides. Before Carson published Silent Spring, Rudd published two articles in The Nation in 1959, ‘The Irresponsible Poisoners’ and ‘Pesticides: The Real Peril’. Rudd, a sophisticated leftist thinker, argued that the over-use of pesticides such as DDT was based on a misplaced prioritization of ‘production’ over other values. He wrote, ‘Overproduction has settled on us like a plague… Chemical use to increase production is continually stressed and few stop to inquire “why?”’ (cited in Foster and Clark 2008). It is clear that Carson shared Rudd’s view that the problem of pesticides is one of ‘values’, and that the privileging of productionism and profit-seeking – regardless of collateral damage – is the heart of the problem.

Little tranquilizing pills of half truth from the gods of profit

Throughout Silent Spring, Carson focuses much of her critical analysis on the processes of ‘manufacturing consent’.² She asks, pointedly and poignantly:

Who has made the decision that sets in motion these chains of poisonings, this ever-widening wave of death? Who has placed in one pan of the scales the leaves that might have been eaten by the beetles and in the other the pitiful heaps of many-hued feathers, the lifeless remains of the birds that fell before the unselective bludgeon of insecticidal poisons? Who has decided – who has the right to decide – for the countless legions of people who were not consulted that the supreme value is a world without insects, even though it be also a sterile world ungraced by the curving wing of a bird in flight?

(Carson 1967:118)

She answers her own rhetorical question with a round condemnation: ‘The decision is that of the authoritarian temporarily entrusted with power; he has made it during a moment of inattention by [the] millions to whom beauty and the ordered world of nature still have a meaning that is deep and imperative’ (118).

Long before political economy analyses became familiar grist for the environmentalist mill, Carson sounds a presciently radical warning about the dangers of a public policy and science agenda driven by the pursuit of profit by pesticide industries:

It is… an era dominated by industry, in which the right to make a dollar at whatever cost is seldom challenged. When the public protests, confronted with some obvious evidence of damaging results of pesticide applications, it is fed little tranquilizing pills of half truth. We urgently need an end to these false assurances, to the sugar coating of unpalatable facts. It is the public that is being asked to assume the risks that the insect controllers calculate.

(Carson 1967:23)

Carson saved some of her fiercest criticisms for the cozy collusion she witnessed between industry and supposedly independent university scientists or government officials – the very people who should have provided a firewall against the practices of profit-seeking industries. She decried the influence of money in entomology that drew scientists away from research into non-chemical insect control approaches and that kept them beholden to the chemical companies. Remarking that only about 2 per cent of entomological scientists were then working in the field of biological controls, Carson is palpably pained that most insect scientists are more drawn to the ‘exciting’ work in chemical control. Carson rhetorically asks ‘why’, and in answering herself points to the influence of funding. She remarks that chemical companies are pouring money into universities and research labs to support work on insecticides, while biological-control studies have no financial champions. There is no money to be made in biological control, she pointedly remarks.

She goes on to make the point that this cozy financial relationship undercuts the integrity of the pursuit of science. She is mystified that entomologists might ever be leading advocates of chemical control, an improbable position she attributes to the corrupting influence of the financial support of chemical companies. By the time Carson was writing Silent Spring, chemical companies had insinuated themselves into research institutes and academia, and were starting to produce privately funded science. The entomologists who promoted chemical controls were, Carson said, most likely supported by the chemical industry itself. Perhaps, she says ruefully, one could not expect them to ‘bite the hand that feeds them’. But, she warns, this close relationship between industry funding and the research process means that conclusions that insecticides are ‘harmless’ had little credibility. As science cozied up to industry, it undercut its own position.

Post– Silent Spring, Carson’s remarks about industry collusion with science became even sharper still. In a speech to the US Women’s National Press Club in 1962, she repeatedly warned against the corrupting influence of chemical companies funding basic science and ended with a rousing denunciation of the ‘gods of profit and production’:

Support of education is something no one quarrels with – but this need not blind us to the fact that research supported by pesticide manufacturers is not likely to be directed at discovering facts indicating unfavorable effects of pesticides. Such a liaison between science and industry is a growing phenomenon, seen in other areas as well. The AMA [American Medical Association], through its newspaper, has just referred physicians to a pesticide trade association for information to help them answer patients’ questions about the effects of pesticides on man… We see scientific societies acknowledging as ‘sustaining associates’ a dozen or more giants of a related industry… What does it mean when we see a committee set up to make a supposedly impartial review of a situation, and then discover that the committee is affiliated with the very industry whose profits are at stake?…

Is industry becoming a screen through which facts must be filtered, so that the hard, uncomfortable truths are kept back and only the harmless morsels allowed to filter through? I know that many thoughtful scientists are deeply disturbed that their organizations are becoming fronts for industry… here the tailoring, the screening of basic truth, is done, not to suit a party line, but to accommodate to the short-term gain, to serve the gods of profit and production.

(Carson 1998a:208–210)

Carson’s warnings about the ‘science-industry’ complex came at a distinctive moment in the way Americans were viewing large, powerful institutions. This shift was prompted to a signifi-cant extent by President Dwight Eisenhower. It was in 1961, just as Carson would be finishing Silent Spring, that Eisenhower (a retired general) su...