Likewise the substantive arguments of Silent Spring, which deal mainly with the widespread use of pesticides, seem positively mundane by comparison to the grander nightmares of today's eco-prophets of doom, who proclaim a carbon-stricken future salvageable only through worldwide economic reorganization. Last year, faced with the revelation that his panel's widely-hailed prediction of Himalayan glacial melt was based on conjecture rather than peer-reviewed studies, IPCC chairman (and Wolfpack alumnus) Rajendra Pachauri responded in unfortunately characteristic fashion. Rather than admit that his agency's credibility had been damaged or even called into question by its, ahem, creative interpretation of the scientific method, Dr. Pachauri attacked the news media for questioning the validity of non-peer-reviewed "grey literature" and insisted that glacial melt constituted a threat "which we can only ignore at our own peril and the peril of generations yet to come." Admittedly, meltwater seems hardly worth worrying about if we first drown in the incessantly rising tide of hubris surrounding global warming (or "climate change," or "global weirding," to employ any one of the increasingly vague iterations through which the always-looming doom has passed).
With the style and substance of the book long surpassed by its spiritual progeny, then, the most striking feature of Miss Carson's magnum opus today is not what it contains but what it lacks--namely, any discussion of the relative costs and benefits of environmental policies. Notwithstanding the histrionic tone, some of her recommendations are simple and sensible. For instance, the spread of Dutch elm disease might be prevented by encouraging "a richly diversified planting" along city streets, instead of creating a homogeneous population of trees that look lovely but facilitate large-scale breeding of pests and disease.
Yet far too many of her claims basically consist of identifying the cost of a particular action and ignoring any benefits. For instance, she complains that "In western Java in the course of the anti-malarial program carried out by the World Health Organization, many cats are reported to have died. In central Java so many were killed that the price of a cat more than doubled." While the death of beloved pets and useful rat-catchers is certainly regrettable, one might reasonably accept the tradeoff in order to fight malarial mosquitoes, which continue to kill hundreds of thousands annually (mainly in sub-Saharan Africa). Neither does the author adjudge whether staggering infant mortality rates and the excruciating, fevered convulsions of malaria patients would constitute a necessary and acceptable price for building a society that "accommodated ourselves to this planet and viewed it appreciatively, instead of skeptically and dictatorially."
Economists, like environmentalists, have contributed our share of mistaken and misguided notions to the world, ranging from the humorous (the sunspot theory of inflation) to the catastrophic (the original Phillips curve theory of inflation). One truthful and important contribution has been the idea of cost-benefit analysis, at the bottom of which lies the simple and hard recognition that nothing in life is free. If scientists and the government had heeded Miss Carson's call and permitted only those uses of chemicals which were entirely cost-free, we might very well have no chemicals at all today. Certainly there would have been no Green Revolution, and no end to the famines which plagued much of Asia and the Indian subcontinent until modern pesticides and fertilizers were introduced.
Bird song is a precious gift; so is the life of an Ethiopian peasant farmer. The interaction of man with nature demands a thoughtful, careful, and well-intentioned balancing of costs and benefits, with a large measure of humility and a willingness to adjust one's methods as new technology and new information comes to light. Fifty years on, that is all the more reason to beware of the shrill sermonizing, questionable scholarship, and one-sided denunciations that characterize Silent Spring.
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| Silent Knight. |
