Matt and Jerusalem read “Silent Spring”

I am not a huge fan of America’s major environmental institutions.

I believe that pollution is bad and climate change is real, and I think it’s important that policymakers take that into account. But the worldview, ideology, and priorities of the green establishment strike me as significantly askew from the imperatives of economic growth and democratic accountability. So when I saw that Rachel Carson’s 1962 book, Silent Spring, is now marketed on the cover as “the classic that launched the environmental movement,” I expected to find a book that I hated.

But as is often the case, the classics are classic for a reason. Carson’s specific arguments about the over-use of pesticides are very convincing. She has an eco-modernist streak in which she endorses the sterilization techniques that were successfully used to fight the New World screwworm as an alternative to spraying. Importantly, she was just factually correct to raise the point that insects’ very rapid life cycles mean that they tend to quickly evolve resistance to insecticides.

Jerusalem in particular really got pretty Carson-pilled, seeing her as someone who built her case patiently, marshaled evidence, and won.

I’m a little more cynical. Despite the book having real strengths, you can also see the fatal flaws of green ideology all the way through the text. Carson repeatedly expresses a very backward-looking romantic nostalgia. She doesn’t really distinguish between actual wilderness and just old-timey farms that she thinks are picturesque. She doesn’t seem interested in economic growth or human poverty. And Jerusalem and I agree that Carson is unduly skeptical of the normal political process and the idea of just persuading elected officials to do different stuff if you want them to weigh the balance of considerations around conservation issues differently. Modern environmentalism has instead embraced the idea that true democracy somehow involves endless rounds of consultation and post hoc litigation, and while I wish you could say that’s untrue to the core text, I’m not really convinced that it is.

Has the glass been half full or half empty all along? Does the green movement need to get back to its roots or does an informed approach to environmental issues need to cut loose from those roots?

We get into all of it on this week’s episode of The Argument.

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