Rachel Carson and the Normative Assumptions of Environmental Policy

In the canon of environmental movement literature, Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring stands prominently. This 1962 book is widely credited as the urtext of environmentalism. It also contains the basic normative tension within environmental policy, to whose benefit do environmental regulations serve?

Do we enact environmental policy for the benefit of humans? That is certainly how environmental action is sold to the public. It’s also the primary perspective Carson lays out in Silent Spring. She is mostly writing about the negative externalities of pesticide DDT on people. 

Or do we enact environmental policy for the benefit of the earth? From this perspective, humanity itself can be seen as the ultimate pollutant. Rather than mitigate negative externalities that humans impose on other humans, this romanticism privileges nature over humanity. Seeing a human war against the earth, environmentalists motivated by this perspective want government policy to side with nature, to mitigate anthropogenic interests. 

At the beginning of this political movement, Carson is explicit that she is trying to promote “the awareness that we are dealing with life—with living populations and all their pressures and counterpressures, their surges and recessions.” This extension of the sanctity of life to other creatures is an important philosophical basis for many environmental advocates. Normative ecology goes beyond the careful study of the complexity of nonhuman life for the benefit of humanity to start making unwarranted assumptions about the intentionality of the natural world. 

Before the publication of Silent Spring, humanity enjoyed an industrial revolution that fundamentally improved human living standards. There was also a tremendous amount of pollution to get to that point, much of it could legitimately be regulated from an anthropocentric perspective. For example, preventing a firm from dumping mercury into a nearby river can be justified entirely on the net benefit to humans. 

But Carson goes further than this, seeing the age before her as primitive. Sometimes we intentionally spread chemicals for the benefit of humanity. That’s what pesticides like DDT are, a benefit to society that manages nature. Carson opposed this on a philosophical level: 

The “control of nature” is a phrase conceived in arrogance, born of the Neanderthal age of biology and philosophy, when it was supposed that nature exists for the convenience of man. The concepts and practices of applied entomology for the most part date from that Stone Age of science. It is our alarming misfortune that so primitive a science has armed itself with the most modern and terrible weapons, and that in turning them against the insects it has also turned them against the earth.

Therefore, to whatever degree she had a valid point about the overuse of DDT, Carson was ultimately opposed to DDT’s beneficial uses as well. 

This normative perspective has applications far beyond the use of pesticides. In Oregon, timber is the ultimate renewable resource. So, when we restrict logging do we do that to maximize long-term benefits to Oregonians, or are we doing that for the perceived needs of the earth?

The human benefit rationale for environmental policy is emphasized publicly, but this other perspective might drive policies that struggle to show a net benefit to humans. When a regulation is designed to box people in, as an end in itself, that normative motivation should be explicitly transparent. 

Eric Shierman lives in Salem and is the author of We were winning when I was there.