Rachel Carson’s Environmental Ethics

Abstract

Rachel Carson is well known as a founder of the modern American environmental movement, which some date to the publication of Silent Spring in 1962. This essay argues that Carson was not just a successful polemicist, but a deep and insightful environmental thinker, whose life and writings have much to offer contemporary environmental philosophy. It focuses on explicating the environmental ethics articulated in Silent Spring, which rest on the triple foundation of human health considerations, the moral considerability of non-human beings, and the value to humans of preserving wild nature and a diverse and varied landscape. Carson generally emphasizes the complementarity in the great majority of cases of the three basic goals of protecting human health, preserving non-human life, and promoting human flourishing. In trying to move her society toward greater recognition of non-human interests and higher human interests, she develops an environmental ethics with both non-anthropocentric and enlightened anthropocentric elements. While Silent Spring shows how these two aspects may ‘converge’ regarding an important public policy issue, Carson’s own life, dedicated to knowing and appreciating nature, shows how they converge at the personal level. Three further themes round out the ethical argument of Silent Spring. First, Carson’s disapproval of economism – the overvaluation or exclusive focus on economic goals and pursuits. Second, her criticisms of a human ‘war on nature’. Third, her warnings concerning the increased artificiality and simplification of the landscape.