Would it have made a difference if a man had written it, a well-known scientist?
I wondered that this morning as I walked through our parched and silent woods here in the southern Rockies.
Some people did listen when Rachel Carson published Silent Spring sixty years ago, and it may have been due to her book that we eliminated, over the course of some years, the use of DDT with its disastrous consequences for the birds.
But we didn’t do much else.
And now, as I walked for ninety minutes, I heard six bird notes—one of them repeated—and saw nothing sprouting in the dirt under the long-lasting pinion and juniper trees that can survive decades of drought—till the Forest Service in its wisdom burns them all in one of its set fires. The most recent fire, started when we were experiencing winds up to seventy miles an hour, burned out of control and destroyed half of a town.
The men in charge of setting these fires, much-criticized but never abated, may have heard of Carson’s book but it could have had no impact.
Written by a quiet woman with no claim to fame, the book’s power was inevitably diluted. I am left hanging on to the ancient maxim, “Brighten the corner where you are”—my irrigated garden oases, full of flowers.
But we are facing equally grave threats here in New Mexico, where the Department of Energy in Washington has just allocated more than eight billion dollars to Los Alamos, the nuclear lab that has loomed over Santa Fe since the 1940’s.
That’s more than the total budget for this poor state that ranks near the bottom in terms of poverty. Money for nuclear pits doesn’t “trickle-down”; it stays in Ls Alamos, increasing the enormous salaries of nuclear physicists.
A friend of mine recently observed that these highly intelligent men, measured on the usual scale, often suffer from Asberger’s—that narrowing of the vision that permits a dramatic focus on one issue and one issue alone. Their wives are prone to breakdowns and alcoholism.
It would require a spiritual awakening across this country to bring about any real change. And that awakening seems unlikely. So in addition to prayer and my garden, I turn to the poets who are our seers, including Adrienne Rich, whose 1971 poem, “Trying To Talk to a Man” begins
Out in this desert we are testing bombs,
that’s why we came here.
What we had to give up to get here—
whole LP collections, films we starred in
playing in the neighborhoods, bakery windows
full of dry, chocolate-filled Jewish cookies,
the language of love letters, of suicide notes,
afternoons on the riverbank
pretending to be childrenComing out to THIS desert
we meant to change the face of
driving among dull green succulents
walking at noon in the ghost town
surrounded by a silence…Coming out here we are up against it.”
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