Behind recent attempts to discredit the validity of human-caused global climate change is the same reluctance to examine ethical principles that Rachel Carson raised in her seminal work, Silent Spring.

That a renewed opposition to Carson’s challenge to the pesticide industry is occurring precisely when Americans are beginning to question the values that make us an unsustainable society should come as no surprise. Rachel Carson illuminated the interconnectedness of humans with all living communities pointing out that, when human activity might harm other living systems, we should exert prudence so that our actions do not reach back to us one day.

I am thankful to Mark Hamilton Lytle for making that observation in his biography The Gentle Subversive – Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring and the Rise of the Environmental Movement.
A focus on ethics requires us to ask questions like, “Where are we investing our nation’s resources and why?”

As a nation we once engaged in just such discussions. When English colonists broke-away from a government experienced as unjust, greedy, and violent in nature a broad and lively discussion about values found berth in the ark of democracy. The period of 1772 to 1788 engaged some of the greatest minds on two continents: Native American statesmen and scholar-citizens of the thirteen colonies, as well as free thinkers from Europe. They came together to establish an ethical basis for the declaration of independence from Great Britain and the formation of a constitution to guide a fledgling nation of free men.

Perhaps the absence of established political parties and their corporate alliances created rhetorical space for a range of ideas to be discussed openly and thoroughly in contrast to what we have today. But more, I believe it was the tradition of liberty that existed on this continent, created over centuries by nations existing before the colonies began to form, that promoted the kind of thinking and decision-making that ultimately found its way into our nation’s founding documents.

Statesmen from America’s first democracies, notably the Iroquois Confederacy and Cherokee Nation, were consulted by colonial leaders to learn what lessons these older democracies gleaned over the centuries. The Great Law of Peace of the Iroquois recognized the rights of all living things according to natural law. Under their constitution, plants, animals and resources necessary for continuance of life such as rivers and land find protection under the Flowering Tree, symbol of the Great Law. From it the White Roots of Peace extend to all peoples.
From the Cherokee Nation flowed the values of respecting differences and including outsiders in their community life. The Cherokee, whose belief that all living things are our relatives and can speak to us through spiritual connection, must have communicated these values through their eloquent language to the colonial writers.

Today, many individual scholars and organizations for the preservation of American Liberty are re-examining these values and principles of governance in light of the pressures of destabilizing national and global problems. The theme of natural rights of living communities flows through Rachel Carson’s body of writing and finds its culmination in Silent Spring.

Carson synthesized the principle of interconnectedness of living systems through stories of individual species lives (Under the Sea Wind), sweeping sagas of Earth’s history that read like a novel (The Sea Around Us), the science of ecology (Edge of the Sea), and the intricate systems of linked organisms called food chains (Silent Spring). In her lifetime as a writer, Rachel Carson was America’s most important science educator. Her books often appeared as a series in major magazines or Reader’s Condensed Books, reaching millions of Americans hungry to learn more about the wonders of the sea.

Yet, Rachel Carson’s articulate voice reached is clarion call in Silent Spring in which she warned us that we cannot live outside of the natural laws that govern all life on earth, and to attempt to do so imperils all life on Earth.

Even though Carson was a scientist, her power lay in her writing. More than translating scientific facts, Carson’s brilliance emanated from her understanding of humankind’s spiritual connection to the Earth. In Sense of Wonder, written for parents, Carson emphasized feelings (emotions) for the Earth and her creatures had to come before facts:

I sincerely believe that for the child, and for the parent seeking to guide him, it is not half so important to know as to feel. If facts are the seeds that later produce knowledge and wisdom, then the emotions and the impressions of the senses are the fertile soil in which the seeds must grow. The years of early childhood are the time to prepare the soil. Once the emotions have been aroused — a sense of the beautiful, the excitement of the new and the unknown, a feeling of sympathy, pity, admiration or love — then we wish for knowledge about the subject of our emotional response. Once found, it has lasting meaning. It is more important to pave the way for the child to want to know than to put him on a diet of facts he is not ready to assimilate. (Sense of Wonder, 1965)