Why I remember "Silent Spring"

Sam Smith

Next year it will have been fifty years since the publication of "Silent Spring" by Rachel Carson. To me this is far than an historical marker. I came to environmentalism not thanks to the depth of redemption nor the sincerity of conversion but through simple genetic happenstance. My parents started an organic beef farm in Maine in the late 1950s and some years before the publication of Silent Spring successfully sued the Central Maine Power Company for using pesticides to clear the brush away from their electric lines. As a result of that suit, to this day the power company may not spray anyone's property in Maine who requests that it not do so. I was at my parents' home when my father - a lawyer himself - contacted six of the top lawyers in the state to see if they would take the case. All six were on retainers from the Central Maine Power Company and said no. Thus it was that the town lawyer, Paul Powers, won the case.

I grew up thinking the Holy Trinity was Adel Davis, Robert Rodale and Louis Bromfield and while, as a callow teenager, I refused to drink carrot juice and would sometimes accuse my parents of being agricultural Christian Scientists, it all eventually took hold. After all, it is hard not to become environmentally conscious when one's mother reacts to the appearance in her house of a simple can of insect repellent as though it were a pipe bomb.

The farm, Wolfe's Neck Farm,  is now a non-profit  operation visited by a couple of thousand children every year and runs a day camp for about 400 more, along with its agricultural activities. I am the only member of the board who has, over the years, been both chair and spread manure on the fields, which I can assure you is of a sort much preferable to the metaphorical variety that occupied me while covering Washington.


PS: Years later, I found in my mother's copy of Bromfield's Malibar Farm two magazine clippings, reviews of Bromfield's and Carson's books, both published in the New Yorker. The discovery brought a wave of optimism. After all, if a magazine in the world's largest city could have understood what was happening to the land so early, there's still hope for all of us.