The Bible in Environmental Ethics: A Re-Visioning of Rachel Carson’s Apocalyptic Language in Silent Spring
Kristel A. Clayville
When Rachel Carson first published Silent Spring, it was seen as a call for people to pay attention to even the smallest and seemingly invisible parts of nature as integral to the functioning of the natural world. It is indeed hard to get people to see something they haven’t seen before, but what Carson achieved was in fact different, and harder: in Silent Spring, she does not only call for previously ignored minute parts of nature to be included in the dominant paradigm, but in fact urges her readers to reject that paradigm wholeheartedly, in favor of a different approach that is, by her account, necessary for a true appreciation of nature, as well as for a genuine understanding of what is at stake in the environmental crisis. Likewise, Carson’s fellow environmentalist Holmes Rolston asserts that, “‘Seeing’ is universally ‘seeing as.’ We interpret what we see in order to see it.” These two short sentences at the beginning of Rolston’s section on models, patterns, and paradigms in religious and scientific thinking are pithy. Drawing on both modern philosophy (Heidegger) and his own Reformed tradition (Calvin), Rolston describes our reality as metaphorically structured, thus suggesting that humans are fundamentally interpreting creatures. He also uses a visual metaphor, drawn from Calvin, to give further detail to how we humans structure our reality. Thus, our interpretations are not simply about the past or the contemporary moment, but they give us a vision, or a horizon toward which to move. Yet, the question remains: which lens or lenses are we going to use to focus and give clarity to our vision? Or to put it differently, which symbolic forms and structures are we going to use as our interpretive context, providing us with a focal point on our horizon? Much work in environmental ethics has abandoned religious lenses or symbolic forms with the exception of apocalyptic language; moreover, the apocalyptic language of contemporary environmental ethics is often traced back to Silent Spring. But unlike contemporary writers, Rachel Carson did not use apocalyptic language simply to evoke emotional responses from her readers; rather, Carson used it to counter the dominant narrative of human progress and the implied ethics that were drawn from the biblical creation story.
In this essay, I propose that Rachel Carson, like Holmes Rolston, was commenting on the structure of human perception and understanding in Silent Spring, and that her use of apocalyptic language was a response to her cultural and intellectual environment, as well as an attempt at correcting our vision of human-nature relations and our interpretive frameworks. In short, Carson saw humans as fundamentally interpreting creatures and sought to grind lenses to correct our vision. In doing so, Carson drew on a historical form of apocalyptic and its ethical foundations to counter the general assumption that human progress comes through the domination of nature. Thus, her apocalyptic language is both a source of ethical thinking embedded in the form of her argument, and is a counter-narrative to the diluted and generalized readings of the biblical creation story that funded and rationalized much of human scientific progress. By drawing on apocalypticism, Carson counters one biblical tradition and its ethical implications with another, and in doing so, she ultimately puts pressure on the assumed form of discourse in which the creation story participates. In the end, Carson’s apocalypticism alters our vision not only of the world around us, but also of the biblical text that led to our anthropocentric vision, thereby opening up new potential interpretations to aid and accompany our altered vision.
This essay will proceed by 1.) addressing the received narrative of human progress and its biblical foundation as part of Carson’s intellectual and cultural environment; 2.) discussing Carson’s use of apocalyptic language as part of the macro-structure of her argument and as a response to the narrative of human progress; and 3.) specifying the consequences of Carson’s apocalyptic response for readings of the biblical creation story and its potential uses in environmental ethics.
1. The Biblical Creation Story: Human Progress at the Expense of Nature
Rachel Carson’s intellectual and cultural environment was saturated with the narrative of human progress, many times at the expense of nature. The most well-known scholarly article to point toward the source of this narrative was Lynn White’s “The Historical Roots of our Ecologic Crisis,” which argued that Christianity and Judaism were responsible for the predominant worldview based on the dualism between humans and nature. This Judeo-Christian worldview puts humans at the center of concern and value as “created in the image of God,” and further encourages humans to use nature to exhibit such dominance and to achieve human oriented ends. While White’s critiques are not particularly nuanced, he provided two critiques that have shaped the debate about the use of the Bible in environmental ethics. First, he identified a set of relationships between biblical text, Judeo-Christian tradition, worldview, and human action. Second, he pointed to Genesis 1:26-28 as the main problematic text that underscores human distinctiveness from nature, and human dominion over nature. These two problems work together to show that what we think about the Bible and how or if we think with it has a direct effect on contemporary worldviews.
White’s critiques sparked a significant recovery effort on the part of biblical scholars and theologians, who began to offer new interpretations of Genesis 1:26-28 in an effort to reform how we think about nature. But, while the problem identified by White is the relationship between biblical text, Judeo-Christian tradition, worldview, and human action, the responses were predominantly organized around the discussion of human being—in part because they were organized around reinterpreting what it means to be created in God’s image. The assumption was that if we could figure out what it means to be made in God’s image, then we could move from there to defining moral and immoral action. Other thinkers, particularly those without any prior allegiance to religious texts or traditions, saw in White’s critique a call for abandoning religious texts altogether. Carson’s Silent Spring undermines both of these positions by decentering humans as the starting point for discussions of morality, and by confronting inherited interpretations of biblical texts head on.
While White’s seminal article post-dates Carson’s death, I contend that White’s description of the role of the Bible and the worldviews it encouraged saturated Carson’s intellectual and cultural environment. In fact, on my reading of Silent Spring, Carson jumpstarts the conversation about the use of the Bible in environmental ethics prior to Lynn White’s article and in a sophisticated and subtle way; namely, by using a competing strand of the biblical tradition as a corrective lens to the received narrative of progress. Carson was not a biblical scholar, nor was biblical interpretation at the forefront of her work, but her intellectual environment included conversations about biblical interpretation and its relationship to human action in contemporary culture, and therefore intentionally or not, her work is a response to this environment.
The contours of the narrative of human progress to which Carson responded are the inheritance of the biblical literalism that began in the Early Modern period and are characterized by the shifting definitions of “subdue” and “have dominion” in Genesis 1:26-28. While “subdue” and “have dominion” may seem like transparent terms to the modern reader, the Patristic and Medieval interpreters read these terms as psychological and spiritual symbols. Generally, “having dominion” over nature referred to controlling your own human nature and desires in the Patristic period, while in the Medieval period dominion was interpreted as seeking knowledge about nature. Natural objects mentioned in the biblical text functioned as symbols that referred to spiritual realities. In both cases, “having dominion” was about reaching toward another world, not about controlling the existing material world. In these earlier periods, the literal readings of these texts are subordinated to the spiritual and moral readings. In the 17th century, with the rise of Protestantism, interpretive upheavals abound. As Peter Harrison notes, Protestants emphasized the Word of God, with the consequence that words alone have referential meaning. Thus, the words about nature in the text could not refer to spiritual realities or parts of the human soul—they referred directly to their analogues in the material world. Harrison goes on to argue that “subdue” and “have dominion” were part of a larger theological project of restoring nature after the Fall. Not only had humans suffered the Fall, but nature had also become more difficult to live in and work with. In fact, the view of nature as full of weeds and pests that Rachel Carson ascribes to “the man with the spray gun (85)” is similar to the view of nature as fallen and in need of restoration. Biblical literalism in its theological context blended with the rise of science, which was employed in the restoration project.
In Lynn White’s view, and what I argue is Rachel Carson’s context, the literal reading method became dissociated from its restorative theological context, and consequently the reading method took on a life of its own. Without its theological moorings, the literal reading method could be used to justify innumerable scientific advancements under the guise of “subduing” and “having dominion” over nature as part of human action that is in accord with being “made in the image of God.” In public discourse much of the theological context was obscured and White’s argument took the form of criticizing the ethics in the Bible as if they were normative for Judaism and Christianity. While many thinkers have countered White’s claims, the point here is simply to paint the background landscape of Carson’s intellectual and cultural environment.
The ethics that White and others see in the biblical creation story and permeating culture are anthropocentric and depend on hierarchy and an inanimate description of nature. The ethics are anthropocentric in that only human needs and desires determine the scale of values and appropriate actions. Moral considerability is part of a hierarchical scale based on the days of creation, with the assumption that the simpler parts of nature were created earlier and the more complex parts of nature were created later. This anthropocentric logic places humans at the pinnacle of creation due to complexity, but also due to being “made in the image of God.” Nature is the inanimate backdrop against which humans exercise their godliness. Human actions in nature are justifiable because the material world exists simply for human consumption. Moreover, the understanding of history that this reading implies is one of continual progress. Over time humans become progressively more skilled at being god-like and have even more control over nature. Progress begets progress without end. Though the theological context of these ethics has been stripped away, it is worth noting that if the theological context remained, then the view of history would be qualified by having a theological telos, or end. Human dominion over nature would be part of a restoration project, such that progress is in service of returning to an earlier and more pristine version of both nature and humanity, and the relationship between the two. Within the theological context, history is parabolic rather than linear and unending. Furthermore, in the theological context, human action within history has an effect on the course of history, while in the theologically barren reading human action effects the human movement toward godliness, but it does not change the course of history. History, like nature, can be seen as a simple stage for human action.
Carson’s investment in countering the narrative of human progress is easily discerned in Silent Spring’s dedication, epigraph, and concluding paragraph—the passages that frame her argument. Carson dedicates Silent Spring to Albert Schweitzer, giving a prominent place in her own text to his following words, “Man has lost the capacity to foresee and to forestall. He will end by destroying the earth.” These words from Schweitzer not only show Carson’s indebtedness to his theology of the reverence for life, but also give her book a plan. Carson aims to correct our vision so that we will be able to foresee the consequences of our actions, and possibly forestall them. Schweitzer’s words, on my reading, serve as a program for Silent Spring.
In addition to the dedication, Carson includes two epigraphs in Silent Spring. The first epigraph is by Keats and provides the inspiration for the book’s title and the title of some of its chapters. The second epigraph, by E.B. White picks up on the themes of “subdue” and “have dominion.” E.B. White writes, “I am pessimistic about the human race because it is too ingenious for its own good. Our approach to nature is to beat it into submission. We would stand a better chance of survival if we accommodated ourselves to this planet and viewed it appreciatively instead of skeptically and dictatorially.” Submission and dictatorship mark the human relationships to nature that are untenable long-term and must be addressed. Furthermore, White points out that the human attitude of dominating nature leads to new kinds of technologies, which ultimately lead humans to flee the planet. While Silent Spring itself is a response to this epigraph, Carson also addressed these issues elsewhere. In a speech entitled “The Real World Around Us” given in 1954, Carson states the problem pointedly: