A Mountain to Climb by Hakan Bulgurlu

Author:Hakan Bulgurlu [Bulgurlu, Hakan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Whitefox Publishing
Published: 2021-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

FOOD FOR THOUGHT

‘There was once a town in the heart of America where all life seemed to live in harmony with its surroundings.’ So begins ‘A Fable for Tomorrow’, the opening chapter of one of the most influential environmental books of all time. Its author, Rachel Carson, describes a fictional American town, once rich with nature, but where ‘a strange blight crept over the area and everything began to change … everywhere was a shadow of death.’

Most ominous was the eerie silence that now cloaked the land: ‘The birds … where had they gone? Many people spoke of them, puzzled and disturbed. The feeding stations in the backyards were deserted. The few birds seen anywhere were moribund: they trembled violently and could not fly. It was a spring without voices. On the mornings that had once throbbed with the dawn chorus of robins, catbirds, doves, jays, wrens and scores of other bird voices there was now no sound.’

The American town portrayed in the opening of Silent Spring might not have existed, but all the components and natural disasters Carson had pulled together had occurred in one place or another. She had been inspired to write the book after a letter from a friend in Massachusetts, describing the mass death of birds following the spraying of DDT. DDT was, at the time, the most powerful pesticide in the world. During the Second World War, it had been developed by the Allies and used to rid South Pacific islands of malaria-carrying insects, for which it was extremely effective: the only problem with it was that rather killing the insects specifically, it also obliterated hundreds of different species at the same time.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the war, the Germans had been developing organophosphate nerve agents, so that they could be used as chemical weapons. While that plan never reached fruition, the technology was appropriated by American companies after the war, for use in agriculture in the making of artificial fertiliser. Fresh in American minds was the experience of the 1930s, when the Dust Bowl led to drought, economic misery and the devastation of agricultural lands. With a new array of pesticides and fertiliser at their disposal, and helped by government subsidies to farmers, agriculture flourished. The American food supply was secure, reliable, and, using new methods, producing food that was cheaper for consumers than ever before.

But this abundance came at a cost, as the letter Rachel Carson received in 1958 told. Carson, a bestselling nature writer, decided to investigate. Having failed to persuade any magazine to commission her to write a piece on the subject, she wrote a book about it instead to raise awareness. When it was published in 1962, it was strongly attacked by the chemical industry. Argo-chemical giant Monsanto published ‘The Desolate Year’, a parody of Carson’s ‘A Fable for Tomorrow’ chapter, depicting an America without pesticides: ‘The bugs were everywhere. Unseen. Unheard. Unbelievably universal … beneath the ground, beneath the waters, on and in limbs and twigs and stalks, under rocks, inside trees and animals and other insects – and, yes, inside man.

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