Who is Rachel Carson, the “mother of ecology” whose essential work has just been re-released?

Nature detests emptiness but suffers in silence. For thirty springs, as birds and bees disappeared from the French countryside, Rachel Carson’s voice remained inaudible. Although the pesticide scandals have grown like weeds, his critique of pesticides has not reached us. You could almost hear the flies flying. Yet they were fewer and fewer.

First informant for the environment

This American biologist was the first to sound the alarm. By dint of intoxicating fauna and flora without discernment, human beings have laid the carpet, according to the title of his book published in 1962, to a silent spring. In other words, a mass extermination was progressing calmly.. However, this cry of alarm was not raised in the desert. On the contrary, it had the effect of a bomb in the United States before being translated into French in 1974.

Unfortunately, Rachel Carson had since lapsed into the secrecy of academic circles. ” The book had been forgotten “, Baptiste Lanaspeze is surprised. When this Marseillaise opened his publishing house, Wildproject, in 2008, the French translation hadn’t been available for thirty years.

Obviously, the 40-year-old did it himself a joy to put an end to ” this huge and guilty disinterest “. Since he republished the text in 2009, sales and public curiosity have only increased. ” Rachel Carson is an icon on the other side of the Atlantic, but the French are just discovering her “observes environmental historian Valérie Chansigaud.

A new edition was then printed in May 2022. France has come to realize, paraphrasing an Art documentary published three months earlier, that Rachel Carson was “the mother of ecology”. It was time. From the first publication of silent springthe planet has lost nearly 70% of its wildlife, according to a WWF report.

The worm has been in the fruit for a long time. It took only a few years for scientists to realize that pesticides developed during World War II were everywhere, in land, water and textiles, to subvert ecosystems and ultimately kill farmers. Rachel Carson ranks examples and is surprised that the conditions have been met for a massacre to defeat a handful of insects.

At the beginning of the book, the author imagines a small town in the heart of America where all life seemed to live in harmony with the surrounding environment ” .A beautiful day, “ mysterious diseases decimated the barns; the cattle and sheep withered and died. Everywhere was the shadow of death “. Even the peasants deplored many sick people in their families. ” Self ” each of these disasters actually happened somewhere », This place that unites them all does not exist. But it looks like where she grew up.

The fate of a pioneer woman

when Rachel Louise Carson was born on May 27, 1907., Springdale is a rural village of 1,200 settled souls near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The modest family farm stands here on the banks of the Allegheny River. Given his rather miserable daily life, ” nothing predestines it to become what it will become “observes journalist Isabelle Collombat, author of the children’s book Rachel Carson: no to the destruction of nature (South Acts, 2021).

While his father walks the streets to sell insurance with great difficulty, his mother Maria introduces him to the joys of the garden, the wild world, music and reading. The head of the family takes even more heart because she was prevented from teaching. It was therefore forbidden for married women to lead a class. Times have changed slightly, Rachel escapes this cleaning frustration with the help of her mom and books..

Inspired by Herman Melville, Joseph Conrad and Robert Louis Stevenson, he quickly populated his stories, published by the magazine St. Nicholas from the age of 11 – ships and animals of all kinds. This fascination with nature becomes passion in contact with a biology professor, Mary Scott Skinker, so much so that Rachel Carson finds herself studying the subject..

On his way to writing a thesis in zoology in the wake of his masters degree at Baltimore’s Johns Hopkins University, Carson had to give up being with his father, whose health and finances were deteriorating. He died in 1935. He then found work in the Fisheries Bureau. Impressed by the quality of his articles on the marine world, the publisher Simon & Schuster proposes to Rachel Carson to dedicate a book to him. Published in 1941, ocean life he is praised by his peers. But that’s nothing compared to the success that awaits him.

Ten years later, This sea that surrounds us it sold more than 250,000 copies in six months. With the help of New Yorkerwhich publishes excerpts, this treasure of science and poetry remains for 86 consecutive weeks on the best-selling list of New York Times. “ When I was little it was found in everyone’s home ” recalls his biographer, William Souder.

Having become a recognized author before the age of 50, Carson quit her job in 1952 to devote herself to writing. The following year, he bought a parcel of land in Southport, Maine, and built a vacation home there. His neighbor, Dorothy Freeman, would become his friend and lover. Some of their correspondence, perhaps the most ardent, will have passed through the fire. But in a letter that was not destroyed, Freeman writes: I love you more than anything else. My love is unlimited like the ocean “.

Make confidential knowledge visible

Limitless is also Rachel Carson’s energy. While caring for her grandson, whom she adopted in 1957 upon her niece’s death, and watching over her mother until her last breath in 1958, she collected data on the damage caused by pesticides. ” He has spent his life taking care of others “, The adopted son Roger Christie remembers with emotion.

It is for others that Rachel Carson writes silent spring. Knowing that he is doomed by cancer, the author moves heaven and earth to “ make visible knowledge that is still relatively confidential “, observes Valerie Chansigaud. Putting a clear and powerful verb at the service of great rigor, became one of the first scientists to ” act as an informant “completes the environmental philosopher Catherine Larrère.

Treated like a hysterical old maid in the boot of the Soviet Union by the industrialistsCarson is invited to defend his arguments in front of the CBS chain cameras then in front of the Senate. His flawless work reaches President Kennedy’s ears and participates, in his absence, in pass a series of environmental laws and to ban DDT, one of the most harmful pesticides on the market.

“The sea will always exist (…) if there is a threat, it is for life on land”

” The United States continued to produce and export it until the late 1990s “, Shades William Souder. ” Since then we have had the worst “It affects Catherine Larrère. The environmental philosopher refers to Monsanto’s Roundups, glyphosate or neonicotinoids, all substances that pose problems similar to those of the postwar period.

“ But even damaged, the sea will always exist. If there is a threat, it is to life on Earth “

Rachel Carson, This sea around us

Rachel Carson died on April 14, 1964.. Ironically, she succumbed to breast cancer while trying to prove that pesticides could cause cancers. Its most faithful reader, Dorothy Freeman, scattered her ashes on the coast, thus returning her body to the ocean.

” We can worry that the sea, which is the origin of life on Earth, is now threatened by one of the incarnations of life on Earth. Carson wrote in This sea that surrounds us. ” But even damaged, the sea will always exist. If there is a threat, it is to life on Earth “.

Since then, the threat has spread. For a while swallowed up, the memory of Rachel Carson is re-emerging, as if carried by the undertow. This pioneer of ecology was not opposed to insecticides in principle, first of all she was repugnant to the underlying logic, which is still the basis of their use, as massive as it is indiscriminate..

“ Wanting to control nature is an arrogant claim born of a biology and philosophy that are still at the Neanderthal age.snaps at the end of the book. “The disgrace is that such primitive thinking currently has the most powerful means of action and that, by directing its weapons against insects, it also points them against the Earth. “. In 60 years, this primitive thinking has just evolved.