“… a strange blight crept over the area and everything began to change... Everywhere was a shadow of death. The farmers spoke of much illness among their families…There was a strange stillness... a spring without voices… only silence lay over the fields and woods and marsh.”

–From Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring

My re-covering of Rachel Carson’s seminal book Silent Spring, is a meditation on the recent, current and looming ecological collapse that threatens the survival of all species. Sixty years ago, Carson systematically analyzed the patterns of our self-inflicted environmental demise and methodically presented our suicidal drive towards extinction.

A global journey toward chemical dependance continues to be fueled by the engines of powerful corporations who marketed a century of poisonous industrial farming as the answer to feeding an increasingly overpopulated planet. The highly touted corporate solutions to solving global hunger rely on cycles of heavy and repeated doses of poisonous pesticides and fertilizers to support industrially engineered seeds. The patented seeds, pesticides, and fertilizers are sold to farmers who plant them in huge fields of high-yield subsidized mono crops. They have depleted the soil (requiring even more pesticides and fertilizers to support viability) while poisoning the land, the water, and the air.

Industrial agriculture has given birth to the myriad ecological catastrophes that we and future generations are being forced to grapple with. In 1962, Carson’s existential findings were initially ignored by most people and continue to be denied by many who control the levers of our future. A few listened and acted to alter the follies of corporate greed and the public’s gluttony.

Was Rachel Carson a prophet of our impending doom, or will she be viewed as the saint of our potential survival?