Rachel Carson’s “The Obligation to Endure,” a chapter from her 1962 gorundbreaking book Silent Spring, and Ernest Callenbach’s 1975 novel Ecotopia reveal the realistic and idealistic sides of the early environmental movement. Where Carson’s text is factual and scientific, Callenbach’s is hopeful, idealistic, and futuristic. Carson’s book was a warning about what Americans were doing to the environment and themlves; Callenbach’s was a possible road map for where Americans might go and how life could look. Even though Carson’s book is bleak and almost apocalyptic and Ecotopia is utopian, both texts contain pragmatic suggestions and ideas about how to create a cleaner, greener future. In a way, they rve as two complementary sides of any political movement. If there are only whistle-blowing realists like Carson, it’s possible to lo hope completely. But utopians like Callenbach are easy to dismiss. Both types of writers reflect aspects of American personality: the pragmatist and the idealist. And both types of thinkers have certainly influenced the direction the country has taken in tackling environmental problems.
Given how shocking and extreme—and yet scientifically sound—Carson’s book is, it’s easy to understand why Americans took Silent Spring so riously. At the start of her chapter, Carson states a single, inconvertible fact quite simply: “one species—man—[has] acquired significant power to alter the nature of his world” (344). To Americans of the 1960s, accustomed to myths of the boundlessness of n
ature, such a fact emed stunning. After stating her main argument simply, Carson brings her points home with ntences that combine scientific fact with scary metaphors and images, as when she writes: “This pollution is for the most part irrecoverable: the chain of evil it initiates not only in the world that must support life but in living tissues is for the most part irreversible” (344-45). Carson the scientist us technical terminology to describe living tissue and irreversible process. She also, though, describes the
process as a “chain of evil,” a metaphor that links pollution—and perhaps tho who produce it—to ungodly forces. Carson also labels chemicals as “the sinister and little-recognized partners of radiation” (345). Here Carson personifies both chemicals and radiation as “sinister…partners,” evoking dangerous criminals lurking around the corners of the ecosystem. And in another blending of scientific theory, Carson portrays incts who, “in a triumphant vindication of Darwin’s principle of the survival of the fittest, have evolved super races immune to the particular incticide ud” (346). Anyone who has studied modern biology recognizes the words “Darwin,” “survival of the fittest,” and “evolved.” But here, instead of describing the forces of evolution that produces species better and better adapted to thrive in their environments, Carson describes a scene that ems almost to come from a nightmarish science fiction novel: we are going to have “super races” of bugs, bugs that em
likely to take over the world (if the chemicals in our tissues don’t kill us first). In one of the most enduring images from the chapter, the one that gives the book its title Silent Spring, Carson describes “nonlective chemicals that have the power to kill every inct, the ‘good’ and the ‘bad,’ to still the song of birds and the leaping of fish in the streams, to coat the leaves with a deadly film” (346). Here Carson describes a post-apocalyptic wasteland, the vision of which could leave any reader with a n of dread.
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Callenbach us a far lighter touch to try to persuade his American readers to support a different vision of natural resources and the environment. Where Carson informs and frightens, Callenbach imagines and inspires. In Callenbach’s fictional utopia, high-tech and a clean, beautiful, natural world are not just compatible but synergistic. The blending of technology and nature is epitomized by the description of the high speed train, which travels at “225 miles per hour” (8) and “It looked more like a wingless airplane than a train” (7) but which was “full of
读书照片hanging ferns and small plants” (7). In San Francisco, there are free, driverless streetcars and picture phones in the hotel rooms, but “The bucolic atmosphere of the new San Francisco can perhaps best be en in the fact that, down Market Street and some other streets, creeks now run”
(12).
曹操杀吕布“the potholes…are planted with flowers.” (12) In order to counter possible protests that such restrictions on private travel would require a totalitarian social system, Callenbach also describes how communal people on the train are: “I sat down on one of the pillows, realizing that there would be a good view from the huge windows that came down to about six inches from the floor. My companions lit up some cigarettes, which I recognized as marijuana from the odor, and began to pass them around…and soon we were all sociably chatting away” (7). And the streets of San Francisco are full of happy people: “I came across a group of street musicians playing Bach, with a harpsichord and a half dozen other instruments. There are vendors of food pushing gaily colored carts that offer hot snacks, chestnuts, ice cream. Once I even saw a juggler and magician team, working a crowd of children” (12).
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If Carson were only bleak and Callenbach only emed like he was telling some sort of stoner dream, both texts would be easier to dismiss. But both texts prent some ideas that would get readers thinking: hmmm….maybe Americans could make smaller changes to get us on the right path. Carson describes the emingly simple step of moving away from single-crop farms. lays out an argument against single crop farming; implies we need to diversity crops: “Single-crop farming oes not take advantage of the principles by which nature works; it is agriculture as an engineer might conceive it to be” (347)
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She points out economic disadvantages of the current American system: ”We are told that the enormous and expanding u of pesticides is necearry to maintain farm production. Yet is our
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相信过程real problem not one of overproduction? Our farms, despite measures to remove acreages from production and to pay famres not to produce have yielded such a staggering excess of crops that the American taspayer in 1962 is paying out more than one billion dollars a year as the total carrying cost of the surplus-food storage program” (346). Callenbach, too, focus on economic advantages of his world: “When I asked how the enormous expen of the system had been financed, my companions laughed. One of them remarked that the cost of the entire roadbed from San Francisco to Seattle was about that of ten SST’s, and he argued that the total social cost per person per mile on their trains was less than htat for air transport at any distance under a thousand miles” (8).
“to have a driver on board to collect fares would cost more than the fares could produce” (12)
Concluding paragraph: there are still realistic and idealistic aspects of the environmental movements. Scientists, activists like Carson were instrumental in getting politicians to pass the laws that have helped us have cleaner environment for last forty years: EPA, Endangered Species Act, Clean Air and Water Acts (all 1970s). In a way, Al Gore is carrying on Rachel Carson’s legacy: he is
using sound scientific evidence along with frightening rhetorical techniques to scare the world into action. Idealists like Ernest Callenbach have tried to take action not jus to slow damage but to provide alternative models for Americans. The city of Portland made a bold move in limiting development around the city and prerving a green zone (it ems fitting that Oregon is one fo the states that was part of Ecotopia). And free bicycles have also been part of Portland’s plan. Co-housing communities have sprung up in various places in America, often bad on principles of sustainable living.
