From Silent Spring to Gray Spring—How Can We Reclaim Our Stolen Future?
title: "From Silent Spring to Gray Spring—How Can We Reclaim Our Stolen Future?" slug: "fanchunping-silent-spring-gray-spring-2014.en" date: "2014-04-01" category: "ecology" author: "Fan Chunping" excerpt: "Nearly fifty years after Carson left us, it is time to honor this person and her book once more. Many of us surely feel that, with regard to the human living environment, many things have happened, are happening—and many things still need to be mourned."
From Silent Spring to Gray Spring—How Can We Reclaim Our Stolen Future?
Author: Fan Chunping (Senior Editor, School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Beijing Institute of Technology)
I knew this would be a suffocatingly heavy topic, but when the editor of Guangming Daily's Book Review section asked me—the person who had introduced Rachel Carson's Silent Spring to China through a proper copyright purchase—to write a commemorative piece on this book, I agreed. Because it occurred to me that we were approaching a milestone: the copyright on this book would expire in 2014, meaning Carson had been gone from us for nearly fifty years. It was time to honor this person and this book once more. And beyond this, many of us surely feel that, with regard to the human living environment, many things have happened, are happening—and many things still need to be mourned.
For this solemn memorial, I pulled out the copy of Silent Spring I had published fifteen years earlier, translated by Lü Ruilan and Li Changsheng. It was one volume in the "Green Classics Library," a series I co-produced with Wu Guosheng—he as the editor-in-chief, I as the managing editor. At the time, he was at the Institute of Philosophy of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences while I worked at Jilin People's Press. Our shared background in physics and the philosophy of science led us to a firm consensus on the "Green Classics" project, and together, in less than half a year, we released the first set of eleven volumes, holding a solemn, earnest, and weighty launch ceremony at the Great Hall of the People.
Back then, we felt an intense sense of urgency, genuinely believing that many environmental actions could no longer wait—that the alarm needed to be sounded. Yet all that has happened since has shown us that, in truth, it was already too late even then.
The two installments of the "Green Classics Library" gathered sixteen landmark works from the history of environmental protection, including Silent Spring, The Limits to Growth, Only One Earth, Our Common Future, Walden, A Sand County Almanac, The Closing Circle, Our National Parks, Philosophy Gone Wild, How Much Is Enough?, The Woodcutter, Awaken!, and others.
Opening Silent Spring's dedication page:
To Albert Schweitzer
He said: "Man has lost the capacity to foresee and to forestall. He will end by destroying the earth."
On the following epigraph page is a passage from E. B. White:
"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."
These pessimistic prophecies, read today, strike even harder than they did back then—when, driven by fierce environmental conviction, I worked day and night to bring this series into print. I cannot help but weep, once again helplessly, hopelessly, acknowledging that pessimism.
People today still feel compelled to commemorate this great woman, gone from us for nearly half a century, because everything she warned about, everything she cried out against at the cost of her own life—we have avoided none of it. Our spring has not only fallen silent; it has turned gray. Not only have the birds ceased their singing; even the earthworms in the soil, the fish in the water, the mice in the fields have become scarce. Not only has spring grown gray—summer, autumn, and winter, too, are shrouded under a haze of smog, grown gray.
Silent Spring is universally recognized as one of the ten most important books in human history. Before its publication in 1962, the phrase "environmental protection" simply did not exist in human discourse, nor could any clause related to "the environment" be found in public policy. People had no awareness whatsoever that the environment was something in need of protection. Carson's book sounded the first bugle call for humanity's environmental protection movement. The special committee formed to investigate the environmental conditions revealed in her book became the first NGO in human history; against this backdrop, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency was established. Driven jointly by the environmental movement Carson ignited and the Club of Rome that produced The Limits to Growth, the first UN Conference on the Human Environment convened in Stockholm on June 5, 1972, elevating environmental protection to governmental affairs and international cooperation—a shared cause and mission for all humanity. This conference gave us World Environment Day, observed every June 5, and the United Nations Environment Programme was subsequently founded.
The author also recounts the publishing history of Silent Spring in China in detail—before China joined the Universal Copyright Convention in 1992, Science Press had published a Chinese translation by Lü Ruilan and Li Changsheng. The "Green Classics Library" edition used a revised translation based on the 30th-anniversary American edition of 1994, and was the first Chinese edition in mainland China to be published with formally purchased copyright.
This 30th-anniversary edition carried a foreword by then U.S. Vice President Al Gore. Gore wrote that it was the influence of his mother reading Silent Spring aloud to her children at the dinner table during his childhood that shaped his career in environmental protection.
On January 22, 1996, Vice President Gore wrote another foreword, this time for a book by Theo Colborn and colleagues titled Our Stolen Future, introduced in Chinese translation by Hunan Science and Technology Press. He called it the companion volume to Silent Spring. Gore wrote: "Silent Spring delivered a powerful warning about the dangers of pesticides, inspiring people to take action without delay." Carson had said: "What the consequences of this contamination will be, no one can now predict, for there is simply no precedent to guide or enlighten us." Colborn and her colleagues completed Carson's unfinished work, clarifying the consequences and mechanisms of synthetic chemical contamination.
In 1874, Othmar Zeidler first synthesized DDT. In 1939, the Swiss chemist Paul Hermann Müller discovered this synthetic organic compound's powerful insecticidal properties and was awarded the Nobel Prize. Thereafter, under the strong demonstration effect of DDT, one organic pesticide after another was synthesized. From Müller's epochal discovery in 1939 to the publication of Silent Spring in 1962—a mere twenty-odd years—these ever-more-toxic, highly effective insecticides and fungicides—persistent organic pollutants and endocrine disruptors—while boosting crop yields and saving lives, also caused irreversible damage to the environment and ecosystems.
Today, according to the Ministry of Environmental Protection's 12th Five-Year Plan for Chemical Environmental Risk Prevention and Control, there are 40,000 chemical substances in production and use within China, 3,000 of which are listed as hazardous chemicals—most of them persistent organic pollutants and endocrine disruptors. Beyond this, the dangers of vast numbers of additional chemicals remain unassessed.
Today's spring has not only fallen silent; it has turned gray.
Humanity today must thank Carson for awakening us, and thank Colborn for enlightening us. Thank them.
Facing today's environmental conditions, helpless and powerless as we are, we must remember, must memorialize Carson—must remember, must memorialize the vibrant, bright spring we once had.
As for humanity's way forward, I am, like Schweitzer and White, pessimistic. Yet pessimism does not mean surrender. As long as there is still time, still opportunity, we must strive—to awaken those lost in consumerism and conflict, to face and reclaim the future that has been stolen from us.
Originally published in Guangming Daily Book Review section