Woman vs. man vs. bugs': Gender and popular ecology in early reactions to Silent Spring

Environmental History

Volumn 9, Issue 4, 2004, Pages 701-729

  Hazlett, Maril ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

ECOFEMINISM; ENVIRONMENTALISM; GENDER RELATIONS; GENDER ROLE;

EID: 9744228635     PISSN: 10845453     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.2307/3986266     Document Type: Review

References (178)

1. Rachel Carson, Silent Spring(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1962).
2. Maril Hazlett, "Voices from the Spring: Silent Spring and the Ecological Turn in American Health." in Seeing Nature Through Gender ed. Virginia Scharff (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press. 2oo3), 1O3-28.
3. Samuel Hays, Conservation and the Gospel of Efficiency: The Progressive Conservation Movement. 1890-1920 (1959; reprint, New York: Atheneum, 1975).
4. Samuel Hays, Beauty Health, and Permanence: Environmental Politics in the United States. 1955-1985 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987).
5. Donald Worster, Nature's Economy: A History of Ecological Ideas, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).
6. Adam Rome, "Give Earth a Chance': The Environmental Movement and the Sixties," Journal of American History 90 (September 2003): 525-54
7. Robert Gottlieb, Forcing the Spring: The Transformation of the American Environmental Movement (Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 1993).
8. Roy Attaway, Post-Courier Outdoorsman, "An Unpleasant Thought," Charleston (S.C.) News-Courier, 28 October 1962, Rachel Carson Papers, Beinecke Rare Books and Manuscript Library at Yale University, (hereafter RCP/BLYU).
9. Linda Lear, Rachel Carson: Witness for Nature (New York: Henry Holt & Co., 1997)
10. Paul Brooks, The House of Life: Rachel Carson at Work (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1972)
11. Thomas Dunlap, DDT: Science, Citizens, and Public Policy Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981)
12. Frank Graham, Since Silent Spring (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1970)
13. H. Patricia Hynes, The Recurring Silent Spring (New York: Pergamon Press, 1989).
14. Lear and Hynes books, Doris Z. Fleischer, "Silent Spring: Personal Synthesis of Two Cultures," Bulletin of Science, Technology, and Society13 (1993):200-02
15. "Voices from the Spring", Vera Norwood, Made From This Earth: American Women and Nature (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993), 143-71
16. Michael B. Smith, "'Silence, Miss Carson!' Science, Gender, and the Reception of Silent Spring," Feminist Studies 27 (2001): 733-55
17. Margaret Clark, "Author Carson is Small, Pretty, and Dynamic," Brockton Daily Enterprise, 19 January 1963
18. Ann Cottrell Free, article syndicated through North American Alliance, "Pesticides: One Tiny Woman Jolts Industry," Anderson (S.C.) Independence, 29 January 1963, all in RCP/ BLYU.
19. Carolyn Merchant, Earthcare (New York: Routledge, 1995)
20. Susan Griffin, The Eros of Everyday Life: Essays on Ecology, Gender, and Society (New York: Anchor Books, 1995)
21. Rosemary Radford Ruether, "New Woman and New Earth: Women, Ecology, and Social Revolution," in New Woman, New Earth: Sexist Ideologies and Human Liberation, ed. Rosemary Radford Ruether (1975; reprint, Boston: Beacon Press, 1995), 186-211.
22. Donna Haraway, "A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism," in Feminist Social Thought: A Reader, ed. Diana Tietjens Meyers (New York: Routledge, 1997), 502-31
23. Evelyn Fox Keller, Reflections on Gender and Science (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985).
24. "Introduction," in Seeing Nature, ed. Scharff, xii-xii.
25. One exception is Hynes, who explicitly explores ideas of masculinity and patriarchy in the corporate response to Silent Spring. See, Recurring Silent Spring, 115-39.
26. Rachel Carson to Dorothy Freeman, 1 February 1958, in Always, Rachel: The Letters of Rachel Carson and Dorothy Freeman, 1952-1964, ed. Martha Freeman (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995), 248-49.
27. Margaret W. Rossiter, Women Scientists in America: Before Affirmative Action, 1940-1972, vol. 2 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1995), 304-32.
28. William Cronon, "The Trouble with Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature," in Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature, ed. William Cronon (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1995), 69-90
29. Gottlieb, Forcing the Spring
30. Merchant, Earthcare
31. Roderick Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind, 3rd ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982)
32. Donald Worster, "Fear and Redemption in the Environment Movement," in Ideas, Ideologies, and Social Movements: The United States Experience since 1800, ed. Peter A. Coclanis and Stuart Bruchey (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1999) 158-72
33. Worster, Nature's Economy.
34. Aldo Leopold, "The Land Ethic," in A Sand County Almanac, with Essays on Conservation from Round River (1949; reprint, New York: Ballantine Books, 1970), 237-64, quote on 258.
35. Aldo Leopold, "The Land Health Concept and Conservation," in For the Health of the Land, ed. J. Baird Callicott and Eric T. Freyfogle (Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 1999), 218-26, quote on 223-24.
36. Lear, Witness for Nature, 521, fn. 6.
37. Lear, Witness for Nature, 179.
38. Lear, Witness for Nature, 510, fn. 23.
39. Rachel Carson, "Road of the Hawks," unpublished fragment, Rachel Carson papers, 1945, reprinted in Rachel Carson, Lost Woods: The Discovered Writing of Rachel Carson,
40. Lear, Witness for Nature, 534, fn. 38.
41. Brooks, House of Life, 95-102,318-321.
42. Maril Hazlett, "The Story of Silent Spring and the Ecological Turn" (Ph.D. diss., University of Kansas, 2003), chs. 2-3.
43. Lear, Witness for Nature, 357.
44. RC to Dr. Edward M. Joyner III, 11 March 1960;
45. RC to Mr. Rudolph O. Apelt, 23 September 1961
46. Dr. Francis Silver and Dr. Francis M. Pottenger, 22 June 196o
47. William M. Upholt, Ph.D., 9 November 1960
48. Frederick T. Hill, MD, Thayer Hospital, Waterville, Maine, to RC, 16 October 1961
49. RC to Biskind, 21 August 1961, RCP/BLYU.
50. RC to Marjorie Spock, 12 August 1958, RCP/BLYU (quotation marks in original).
51. RC to Marie Rodell, lO August 1959, RCP/BLYU.
52. Outline preserved in RCP/BLYU.
53. Carson, Silent Spring, 16.
54. Ibid., 297.
55. Ibid. Lisa Sideris, ed., special issue of Reflections: Newsletter of the Program for Ethics, Science, and the Environment 9 (2002).
56. Lear, Witness for Nature, 396-83
57. Graham, Since Silent Spring, 3-90.
58. Public debate contained in boxes 61-62, RCP/BLYU.
59. Lawrence Buell, "Toxic Discourse," Critical Inquiry 24 (1998): 639-66
60. Ralph Lutts, "Chemical Fallout: Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, Radioactive Fallout, and the Environmental Movement," Environmental Review 9 (1985): 210-25.
61. M. H. Herrick to Editor, Richmond (Va.) News-Leader, 23 January 1963, RCP/BLYU.
62. Derrick Jensen, "Carolyn Raffensperger on the Revolutionary Idea of Putting Safety First," The Sun (November 2002), 5-13.
63. Margaret L. Champie to Editor, Portland Sunday Oregonian, 25 November 1962, RCP/BLYU.
64. Yaakov Garb, "Change and Continuity in Environmental World View: The Politics of Nature in Rachel Carson's Silent Spring," in Minding Nature : The Philosophers of Ecology, ed. David Macauley (New York: Guilford Press. 1996), 229-56, esp. 241-43.
65. Robert L. Rudd, "The Chemical Countryside." Pacific Discovery (Nov.-Dec. 1962): 11. Rudd would go on to write Pesticides and the Living Landscape (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1964).
66. Ulrich Beck, Ecological Politics in an Age of Risk, trans. Amos Weisz (Cambridge, Mass.: Polity Press, 1995)
67. Ulrich Beck, Risk Society: Toward a New Modernity, trans. Mark Ritter (London: Sage Publications, 1992)
68. Sylvia Noble Tesh. Uncertain Hazards: Environmental Activists and Scientific Proof (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000).
69. Carson. Silent Spring, 297.
70. Keller, Reflections on Gender and Science: Hazlett. "The Story of Silent Spring," chs. 4, 5, and 6.
71. "Pesticides: The Price for Progress," Time 28 September 1962, 45-48. RCP/BLYU.
72. Hazlett, "The Story of Silent Spring," ch. 4.
73. As quoted in George Murphy, "Pesticides a Boon to Man," San Francisco Examiner, 22 October 1963, RCP/BLYU.
74. Fleischer, "Silent Spring"; Hazlett. "Voices from the Spring Hynes, Recurring Silent Spring; Lear, Witness For Nature: Norwood, Made from this Earth; Smith. "Silence, Miss Carson!"
75. Unsigned editorial, "Woman vs. Man vs. Bugs," Chicago News, 1 October 1962, RCP/ BLYU.
76. Lucius Beebe, as quoted in "It's Your Own Funeral," Louisville (Ky.) Times, 28 October 1963, RCP/BLYU.
77. -Unsigned editorial, "The Wing of a Finch," Richmond (Va.) News-Leader, 22 lanuary 1963, RCP/BLYU.
78. Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans. H. M. Parshley (1952; reprint. Vintage Books, 1989), xxi.
79. Carroll Pursell, "The Construction of Masculinity and Technology," Polhem 11 (1993): 206-19.
80. "Birds and Bunny Boys" is a quote from Audubon Staff Biologist Roland Clement that appears in Lear, Witness for Nature, 437.
81. James Gavagan. editorial, "Silent Spring," The Conservationistl7 (1962):. n.p.
82. Donald Fleming, "Roots of the New Conservation Movement," Perspectives in American History 6 (1972): 7-91.
83. For similar arguments, see Douglas Sackman, "Putting Gender on the Table: Food and the Family Life of Nature," in Seeing Nature, ed. Scharff, 169-93;
84. Amy Green, "She Touched Fifty Million Lives': Gene Stratton-porter and Nature Conservation," in Seeing Nature, ed. Scharff, 221-41.
85. Carson as quoted in Lear, Witness for Nature, 332. Second quote: Carson, Silent Spring, 86.
86. Fred Mendell, "Silent Spring? No, But There Was This Dead River," Hutchinson (Kan.) News, 12 April 1964;
87. Buddy Marceau, "Outdoor Sportsman's Guide," Springfield (Mass.) Union, 6 February 1963;
88. Bob Angler, "Fins, Furs, and Feathers," Burlington Free (Vt.) Press, 11 October 1962;
89. Nelson Benedict, "Hunting and Fishing," Newark (N.J.) Star-Ledger, 2 October 1962.
90. Bud Leavitt, "Outdoors: Mr. Wall Comments on Death Valley," Bangor (Maine) Daily News, 25 July 1963, all in RCP/BLYU.
91. John Anderson, "Outdoors Column," Sandusky (Ohio) Register 29 September 1962, RCP/BLYU.
92. H. F. Drew, "Wide World of Outdoors," Leominister (Mass.) Enterprise, 1962 (rest of date illegible)
93. Stan Berchulski, Springfield (Mass.) News, 27 February 1963
94. Joe Laffy, "Insects Menace to Both Man and Wildlife," (in column titled "Rodney Reel Says ...") Lynn (Mass.) Daily Evening Item, 13 February 1963.
95. Charles Elliot, "Insecticides ... Big Poison is Destroying Our Wildlife," in "All Outdoors" column, Atlanta Journal and Constitution, 22 November 1962, all in RCP/BLYU.
96. Michael Kimmel, Manhood in America: A Cultural History (New York: The Free Press, 1996);
97. Barbara Ehrenreich, The Hearts of Men: American Dreams and the Flight from Commitment (New York: Anchor Books, 1984).
98. Mark Tebeau, "Scaling New Heights: Heroic Firemen, Gender, and the Urban Environment, 1875-1900," in Seeing Nature, ed. Scharff, 63-79.
99. Attaway, "An Unpleasant Thought."
100. Hazlett, "Voices from the Spring," 114-15.
101. Bryant Simon, "New Men in Body and Soul': The Civilian Conservation Corps and the Transformation of Male Bodies and the Body Politic," in Seeing Nature, ed. Scharff,80-102.
102. Lear, Witness for Nature, 567, fn. 42.
103. Raymond K. Long, Jr., to Editor, Audubon Magazine 64 (Nov.-Dec.1962): 299.
104. Gottlieb, Forcing the Spring, 151;
105. Frank Graham, Jr., with Carl W. Buchheister, Audubon Ark: A History of the National Audubon Society (New York: Knopf, 1990), 224-28.
106. "The Editorial Trail," Audubon Magazine 64 (Nov.-Dec. 1962): 306
107. Roland C. Clement, "Review: Silent Spring"
108. ibid., 356; J. V., "Rachel Carson Receives Audubon Medal," Audubon Magazine, 66 (March-April 1964): 98
109. Buchheister, "The President Reports..." Audubon Magazine 66 (July-Aug. 1964): 208.
110. Alfred G. Etter, "When a State Spray Kills the State Bird," Audubon Magazine 65 (March-April 1963): 134
111. George W. Wallace and Richard F. Bernard, "Tests Show 40 Species of Birds Poisoned by DDT," Audubon Magazine 65 (July-Aug. 1963 ): 198.
112. Mrs. Ernest H. Baker to Editor, and Mrs. Anne Stukalo Audubon Magazine 64 (July-Aug.1962): 184-85
113. Mrs. Harold B. Arris to Editor, Audubon Magazine 65 (Nov.-Dec. 1963): 331-32
114. Allan Shields to Editor, Audubon Magazine 66 (Jan.-Feb.1964): 3-4
115. Lorenzo W. Barton to Editor, Audubon Magazine, 66 (March-April 1964): 68. Audubon editors likewise took an ecological approach to pesticides, investigating the effects of these chemicals on not only birds but human health.
116. Robert L. Rudd, "An Introduction to Pesticides," Audubon Magazine 66 (July-Aug. 1964): 222-26
117. Robert L. Rudd, "The Long Range Dangers of Pesticides," Audubon Magazine 66 (Nov.-Dec. 1964): 362-66
118. Hal Borland to Editor, Audubon Magazine 66 (Nov.-Dec. 1964): 340-41;
119. John C. Devlin, "Hal Borland and the Voice of Nature ... On Pesticides, Wilderness, and Wildlife," Audubon Magazine 66 (May-June 1964): 175-77.
120. Murray Bookchin (pseud. Lewis Herber)'s Our Synthetic Environment (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1962) and Theron G. Randolph's Human Ecology and Susceptibility to the Chemical Environment (Springfield, Ill.: Charles C. Thomas, 1962).
121. John Vosburgh, "Staff Reviews: Our Synthetic Environment," Audubon Magazine 64 (Sept.-Oct. 1962): 286
122. Roland C. Clement, "Review: Human Ecology and Susceptibility to the Chemical Environment, by Theron G. Randolph"
123. Clement, "Review: Silent Spring," 360.
124. R. D. B., "Book Reviews," Sierra Club Bulletin 47 (1962 ): 16.
125. Norwood, Made from this Earth, 154-63
126. Lear, Witness for Nature, 314-5, 320, 343, 357-58, 483
127. Hazlett, "Voices from the Spring," 112-14.
128. Ruth Scott (Mrs. J. Lewis Scott) to Editor, Pittsburgh Press, 24 October 1962, RCP/ BLYU. Scott was a friend and correspondent of Carson's, and heavily involved in anti-pesticide campaigns: Lear, Witness for Nature, 387-89.
129. Mrs. Ann E. Wissler, president, San Bernadino Valley Audubon Society, to Editor, Corpus Christi (Texas) Caller, 14 November 1962, RCP/BLYU.
130. Hazlett, "The Story of Silent Spring," ch.3.
131. Anne Mayer Boyes, Secretary, Detroit Audubon Society, to RC, 4 December 1959, RCP/BLYU; Brooks, House of Life, 252.
132. DDT, 81-97. Dunlap also discusses the rise of the Environmental Defense Fund, on pages 129-245.
133. "The Editorial Trail," Audubon Magazine 65 (March-April 1963): 142.
134. Norwood, Made From This Earth, 154.
135. Witness for Nature, 437.
136. Witness for Nature
137. Witness for Nature, 408, 418, 434, 462, 471.
138. Cronon, "The Trouble with Wilderness," 77-78.
139. R. G. Lynch and Cliff Ganschow, "Pesticides: Man's Blessing or Curse?" National Wildlife 1 (1963): l0-13.
140. Maynard W. Cummings, Pest Control Specialist, University of California Agricultural Extension Service, to Editor, National Wildlife 1 (1963): 22.
141. "Pesticides, Man's Blessing or Curse?-They Are Less Deadly Than Aspirin, Have Improved Health, Foods," Ogdensburg(N.Y.) Advance-News, 25 March 1963, RCP/BLYU.
142. Lear, Witness for Nature, 343,442.
143. Stephen Fox, The American Conservation Movement: John Muir and His Legacy(Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1981), 262; Gottlieb, Forcing the Spring, 157-60.
144. Hazlett, "The Story of Silent Spring," ch. 4.
145. Virginia Kraft, "The Life-Giving Spray," Sports Illustrated, 18 November 1963, 22. SI also published four letters to the editor in response to the article on Silent Spring, two for and two against.
146. Mabry I. Anderson, "The Case FOR Pesticides," Field and Stream 69 (September 1964): 12.
147. Bruce S. Wright, director, Northeastern Wildlife Station, "The Plight of the Woodcock," (September 1962): 34-35.
148. Arthur Grahame, "Reports from the Field: Big Spray Trouble," Outdoor Life 123 (March 1959): 24.
149. Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind, 209-22.
150. Aylmer H. Maude, editor, Santa Barbara (Calif.) Condor-Call, to Editor, Sierra Club Bulletin 46 (1961): 6; Meta Ellis to Editor, Sierra Club Bulletin 46 (1961): 11
151. Alfred H. Frye to Editor, Sierra Club Bulletin 46 (1961): 11.
152. Quote from D. B. (David Brower), "Book Reviews: Silent Spring," Sierra Club Bulletin 47 (1962): 16.
153. Clarence Cortam, "A Noisy Reaction to Silent Spring," Sierra Club Bulletin 48 (1963): 4
154. "Lucius Beebe on Silent Spring," Sierra Club Bulletin 48 (1963): 16. Quote from Charles H. Tieman to Editor, Sierra Club Bulletin 48 (1963): 18.
155. Adrian L. Hale to Editor, Sierra Club Bulletin 48 (1963): 14-64.
156. Thomas H. Jukes to Paul Brooks, 6 March 196
157. Thomas H. Jukes to Dr. and Mrs. Edgar Wagburn, cc: Paul Brooks, 16 March 1963, (RCP/BLYU). On Juke's history, see Lear, Witness for Nature, 433-34
158. Gottlieb notes that as late as the 1950s, Sierra Club membership was composed mainly of professionals and businessmen, while the leadership included conservative Republicans. See Gottlieb, Forcing the Spring 41.
159. Gottlieb, Forcing the Spring, 41.
160. "Pesticides-In Washington and Yosemite," and "Spraying Tuolomne Meadows," in Sierra Club Bulletin 48 (1963): 10-11; letters to Editor, Sierra Club Bulletin, regarding Tuolemne spraying debate, 48 (1963): 12-3.
161. William Zimmerman, Jr., "Your Washington Office Report," Sierra Club Bulletin 48 (1963): 20
162. William Zimmerman, Jr., "Your Washington Office Report," Sierra Club Bulletin 48 (1963): 13-14. On the Sierra Club's sometimes reluctant transition to environmentalism
163. Gottlieb, Forcing the Spring, 107.
164. Gottlieb, Forcing the Spring;, Robert Gottlieb, Environmentalism Unbound: Exploring New Pathways for Change (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2001).
165. Driven Wild: How the Fight Against Automobiles Launched the Modern Wilderness Movement (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2002), 9-11.
166. Donald Worster, "The Wilderness of History," Wild Earth (Fall 1997): 9-13.
167. Stewart L. Udall, The Quiet Crisis (NewYork: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1963), 184.
168. A. W. S., editorial, "The Parks as Prologue," National Parks Magazine 38 (July 1964): n.p.
169. "Very few people...," Mrs. W. Clay Babcock to Dr. W.C. Hueper, date not preserved (Hueper evidently forwarded the letter to Carson), RCP/BLYU;
170. "[The] truth is that ...," Mrs. Leona Rienow to RC, 4 January 1963, RCP/BLYU; "I don't think ...," Sally Reahard to RC, 9 July (year not preserved), RCP/BLYU.
171. As Roderick Nash has observed, wilderness and ecology were not necessarily incompatible. See Wilderness and the American Mind, 254-57.
172. Christopher J. Bosso, Pesticides and Politics: The Life Cycle of a Public Issue (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1987).
173. Joshua Blu Bluhs, "Dead Cows on a Georgia Field: Mapping the Cultural Landscape of the Post-orld War II American Pesticide Controversies," Environmental History 7 (January 2002): 99-21;
174. Dunlap, DDT; John H. Perkins, Insects, Experts, and the Insecticide Crisis: The Quest for New Pest Management Strategies (New York: Plenum Press, 1982);
175. Edmund Russell, War and Nature: Fighting Humans and Insects with Chemicals from World War I to Silent Spring (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001)
176. Sandra Steingraber, Living Downstream: An Ecologist Looks at Cancer and the Environment (Reading, Mass.: Perseus Books, 1997);
177. John Wargo, Our Children's Toxic Legacy: How Science and Law Fail to Protect Us from Pesticides, 2nd ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998).
178. Carson, Silent Spring, 12-3.