Isixty years ago, on September 27, 1962, the American publisher Houghton Mifflin published one of the most important books of the 20e century. silent springby Rachel Carson, was already in everyone’s conversation because, all summer long, the New Yorker had begun to give its readers, in serial form, the premiere of its seventeen chapters. Thus, when the volume was officially published, a fierce battle for influence and the containment of public debate had already begun. Feeling that the moment was decisive, and that the conditions of its survival were at stake here, around this book, the chemical industry put all its strength into it.
silent spring denounced the environmental devastation and health risks posed by the massive, indiscriminate and systematic use of synthetic pesticides in agriculture, and many other activities.
Selling half a million copies in its first year, the book launched the modern environmentalist movement. Very few texts can claim to have weighed so much, and above all in such a positive way, on the course of things. Consider that the expression ” protect the environment “so commonplace to our ears, did not begin to spread in all English-language written sources (novels, newspapers, reviews and periodicals, essays, scientific texts, etc.) digitized by Google until the 1960s.
The great victory of the American biologist is also, of course, the prohibition of the famous insecticide DDT in its most massive uses (agriculture, breeding, etc.).
However, with six decades of hindsight, there is little doubt that the chemical industry emerged globally as the winner of the battle waged in the spring of 1962. To understand this, it is not enough to note that industrial agriculture doped with inputs remains mistress of the globe, that all the banned molecules are immediately replaced by others that are often more problematic, that the intensity of their use continues to increase, or that the bulk of public subsidies for agriculture continue to feed this spiral.
To understand and measure the extent of the defeat, it is necessary to read or reread silent spring, recently reissued in France by Wildproject editions. Because re-reading Rachel Carson today means understanding that all the knowledge necessary to act against the massive, systematic and indiscriminate uses of products intended to destroy life was already firmly established sixty years ago. Change the name of the products: the book could have been written yesterday.
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