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Ruling Ourselves with Truth and Grace: Lessons from the Elms

Calvin B. DeWitt

A MOMENT ON THE EARTH: THE GOOD NEWS ABOUT OUR ENVIRONMENT. By Gregg Easterbrook. Viking, 745 pp., $27.95

High above Midwestern streets, they formed living gothic arches. With foliage fanning from branching trunks, American elms stood tall, their tough roots resisting the pounding traffic below.

But they were struck down at mid-century. Fungal spores, airlifted from crown to crown by flying beetles, germinated on fresh green leaves, worked inward and downward through vascular tissues and brought death from crown to root. Deadwood swept across the landscape, providing ever more habitat for spores and bark beetles. We blasted these giants with DDT. Beetles died. Elm leaves glistened and so did the drenched lawns below. We washed DDT from cars and bikes, and blessed it. Eventually we lost the battle to save the elms, but gained new "laboratories of nature" that taught us ecology. We crafted new words by attaching "eco" (from the Greek, oikos, meaning "house" or "household") to them.

Journalist Gregg Easterbrook has joined this wordcrafting by adding "eco" to "realism" and "realists." "The founding concept of ecorealism," he tells us, is this: "Logic, not sentiment, best serves the interests of nature." If we love nature, he advises, we'd better "learn science and speak logic." "One reason I propose ecorealism is to create a language in which environmental protection can be discussed without descending into the oratorical quicksand of instant doomsday on the left and bulldozer apologetics on the right..."

Balance is what he seeks, and he thus allies himself with his predecessor in the 1960s, Rachel Carson, and her award-winning book, SILENT SPRING. On Easterbrook's dust jacket, Carson is acknowledged as the first to sound the environmental alert, the one to whom Senator Abraham Ribicoff declared, "Miss Carson, you are the lady who started all this."

Glancing at where the end notes begin, preparing to flip between Easterbrook's text and sources, I see another acknowledgement of Carson. Noting that "environmental books contain such a confluence of facts that footnoting every reference would cause the little carrot [sic] marks to take over the pages," Easterbrook says it is "for this reason Rachel Carson did not footnote SILENT SPRING." Citing her example, he excuses himself, saying, "Carson provided a general bibliography and a listing of scientific studies, government reports, and other primary documents," and "here I do the same."

I reach for my copy of SILENT SPRING and compare, finding his method similar, but with an important difference: Carson's end notes are cross-referenced to specific page numbers; his are not. Readers are not able to track the links between the text and the sources. Nonetheless, since "balance" seems to be Easterbrook's theme, I look up the term in Carson's index and find that she cites this word only under "balance of nature." In some quarters, Carson writes,

It is fashionable to dismiss the balance of nature as a state of affairs that prevailed in an earlier, simpler world-- a state that has now been so thoroughly upset that we might as well as forget it. Some find this a convenient assumption, but as a chart for a course of action it is highly dangerous. The balance of nature is not the same today as in Pleistocene times, but it is still there: a complex, precise, and highly integrated system of relationships between living things which cannot safely be ignored any more than the law of gravity can be defied with impunity by a man perched on the edge of a cliff. The balance of nature is not a status quo; it is fluid, ever shifting, in a constant state of adjustment.

That is a pretty standard depiction for a biological scientist, I think-- the balance of nature is fluid, ever shifting, always adjusting. Here is Easterbrook on the same topic:

In the standard depiction of the balance of nature, "balance" means inaction. For immense amounts of time ecospheres hold about the same populations of about the same creatures doing about the same things. . . . More than any ecological thinker, Rachel Carson popularized the notion of nature as existing mainly in idyllic changelessness for immense periods. This helped Carson highlight her premise that human-caused environmental changes were happening with unprecedented speed.

Whoa! I look through SILENT SPRING and Carson's other books, seeking evidence for Easterbrook's judgement. My search confirms the opposite. Easterbrook has inverted Carson's message about "balance" not being static and inverted a long-established position in zoology.

Troubled by Easterbrook's inadequate citation of sources, I read the first endnote for each chapter. "My file of enviro quotes is heavy enough to provide ballast for an ocean steamer," he writes. "Yet often in this book I paraphrase ecological sentiment rather than quote a specific person." Out of the book falls a small erratum card which reads: "Please note, on page 382, that the Environmental Defense Fund has not accepted any payment for its advice to McDonalds and Johnson & Johnson, as the text incorrectly states . . . and EDF has not received payment from Prudential."

Now, I am apprehensive. Why would the passage cited on the erratum card have been written incorrectly to begin with? Why would Easterbrook "paraphrase ecological sentiment" rather than quote specific people? Why would he misrepresent Carson's position? Is Easterbrook an "ecorealist" who would "learn science and speak logic"? Does his book exemplify the integrity he espouses?

As I read on, I discovered that my reservations were well-founded. No doubt Easterbrook's "file of enviro quotes" is massive, but he has neither digested nor integrated his material. He has not sifted and winnowed for the truth. He has not been gracious to those seekers who have gone before. While telling us "It's time we began reading from a new script, one that reconciles the ideals of environmentalism with the observed facts of the natural world," he often fails to practice what he advocates.

Taking his advice to learn from the laboratory of nature, we would observe that robins are worm and fruit eaters. We see them thrusting their beaks into soil, tugging and pulling worms from burrows, pecking them repeatedly and working them down their gullets. Or we see them perching in shrubs, feeding on berries. Our observation of robins teaches us that lawns and shrubs are their feeding places-- not bird feeders.

Easterbrook looks at robins too, but does not really see them. Before looking through his eyes, let us enter one of those new "natural laboratories under the elms"-- the 185-acre Michigan State University campus. Carson notes that it was "quite by chance" that John Mehner chose to do research on robins there in 1954. Mehner conservatively estimated 370 adult robins on campus. When this number declined the next year, he and Professor George Wallace found this coincident with extensive spraying of DDT against Dutch Elm Disease.

Carson tells us that "a key piece to the jigsaw puzzle of the doomed robins" was published in 1958 by Roy Barker in the JOURNAL OF WILDLIFE MANAGEMENT. In it he showed how robins are linked to the spraying of elms with DDT: "The trees are sprayed in the spring . . . and often again in July. . . . In autumn the leaves fall to the ground, accumulate in sodden layers, and begin the slow process of becoming one with the soil. In this they are aided by the toil of earthworms, who feed in the leaf litter, for elm leaves are among their favorite foods." Thus the worms consume DDT by eating leaves and robins consume DDT by eating worms that have eaten the leaves. While every robin nest observed by Mehner in 1954 produced young, by the end of June 1957 he found only one young robin. In 1962 only two or three dozen robins were evident on campus.

This "laboratory of nature" taught us about the transfer of biocides in food chains. We learned that as DDT travels up the food chain, it becomes more concentrated by a factor of 10 or so. Carson concluded that as a result of this process, the robin was on the verge of extinction.

To this, Easterbrook responds, "When she put these words on paper in 1962, the robin was the most common bird in North America." Ignoring the extent of the destruction wrought by DDT on robins and other birds, and apparently unaware that our most prolific bird was the English sparrow, he goes on: "The notion that the most prolific avian was about to fall extinct was the most eye-catching assertion in SILENT SPRING and brought the book considerable publicity. The prediction never reached the general zone of truth." Then he proclaims, "The robin remains ubiquitous at backyard feeders."

Easterbrook stretches his credibility further by stating that Carson believed "once the earthworm, a key friendly species, fell extinct from excess spraying of poisons, the food chain of songbirds would be destroyed forever. The next year there would come a silent spring."

Nothing in Carson's book supports this interpretation. Earthworms were never endangered. Carson was a pioneer teacher of what now is widely known-- the bioconcentration of fat-soluble biocides as food is passed upwards in the food chain. She wrote: "We spray our elms and the following springs are silent of robin song, not because we sprayed the robins directly but because the poison traveled, step by step, through the now familiar elm leaf-earthworm-robin cycle. These are matters of record, observable, part of the visible world around us." Thus, hay containing 7 to 8 parts per million DDT, when fed to cows, may lead to butter with up to 65 parts per million DDT. Carson's point is that organisms higher in the food chain, such as birds, are at greater risk.

Carson compiled all instances of verified poisoning and described all of them happening in an imaginary town, warning that "this imagined tragedy may easily become stark reality we all shall know."

We stand now where two roads diverge. But unlike the roads in Robert Frost's poem, they are not equally fair. The road we have long been traveling is deceptively easy, a smooth superhighway on which we progress with great speed, but at its end lies disaster. The other fork of the road-- the one 'less traveled by' offers our last, our only chance to reach a destination that assures the preservation of our earth. The choice after all, is ours to make.

Carson was not predicting a silent spring; she was sounding a warning. She wanted people to "learn science"-- to gain an ecological understanding that would allow them to choose the right path.

Easterbrook comments, "As an ecorealist, I find it marvelous that the premise of SILENT SPRING turned out to be unfulfilled. Society heeded Carson's warning, enacted the necessary reforms (like bans on bioaccumulative pesticides such as DDT and chlordane), and realized such a prompt environmental gain that the day of reckoning Carson foresaw never arrived. . . . Therefore Rachel Carson performed an important public service by being wrong."

Distorting Carson's work, Easterbrook advocates "optimism" about the ecological future. One can be optimistic, but only if we take more seriously Easterbrook himself does the admonition to "learn science and speak logic."

Easterbrook's book is not the place to learn science or logic or ecological realism. He rightly criticizes prophets who remain gloomy even after people listen and change their ways. But he undermines the optimism he advocates by confusing environmental issues, fusing what is true with what is false, and misinterpreting a pioneering woman prophet. He fosters discontentment with nature, touting its "natural badness" and telling us we should alter it into something we think it would rather be. While he advocates a positive approach to environmental issues, his sullen tone controverts the optimism and enthusiasm he says he desires.

I had hoped when I opened the book for a well-founded optimism-- an optimism rooted in truth and grace. Environmental optimism is reasonable and necessary. There are some hopeful signs that we are learning to live rightly on the earth. But our guarded hopefulness is not served by confusing the questions and the issues before us.

On his concluding page Easterbrook envisions "our moment on the earth [as] the juncture at which a profound positive development of history began: the moment when people, machines, and nature began negotiating terms of truce." But his language of war misses Carson's point. She has shown us that the war against nature is inevitably a war against ourselves. Her gracious optimism is the better path to the ecological realism Easterbrook purports to assert. As she stated near the end of her life, "We in this generation must come to terms with nature, and I think we're challenged as mankind has never been challenged before to prove our maturity and our mastery, not of nature, but of ourselves."

Please mail any comments to Dr. Mark Lassiter.