Why does it often seem that disagreements with the green movement stem not from differences over empirical data but from a fundamental difference in philosophy? The answer is found in a book that was a bestseller during the Kennedy administration.

Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring is widely credited as the catalyst for the modern environmental movement. The 1962 book, which alleged that humans willfully ignored the harmful effects of pesticides on the environment, became a New York Times bestseller and captured the American public's attention.

Carson was not the first person to critique pesticide use, and the book didn’t break much scientific ground. But her appeal was spiritual rather than logical.

"Carson uses apocalyptic rhetoric to suggest that unless we change our arrogant attitudes toward the natural world, humankind and nature will be destroyed," Carson biographer Linda Lear explained in 2012. "She intended to disturb and alarm us, and to make us think about tomorrow and not just today. She was prophetic."

Silent Spring’s central thesis was a particular view of human nature and its relationship to the natural world. “The control of nature is a phrase conceived in arrogance, born of the Neanderthal age of biology and philosophy, when it was supposed that nature exists for the convenience of man,” Carson wrote.

This disdain for human arrogance, and the suggestion that the goal of directing nature toward human ends is fundamentally misguided, continue to inform two key ideas in modern environmental ideology: that human beings lack the practical wisdom to orient nature toward human needs, and that human flourishing should be (at best) a secondary or tertiary goal of environmental policy.

However, Carson did not assert that human progress was impossible. Instead, she held to a metaphysical view of nature that constrained her view of the scope of human progress. This is the balance of nature paradigm, a belief that nature does—and more importantly should—exist in a state of balance or a stable “homeostasis.” If some event, such as human activity, knocks it out of balance, nature will eventually right itself and return to its properly balanced end state.

“Nature has introduced great variety into the landscape, but man has displayed a passion for simplifying it,” Carson wrote. “Thus, he undoes the built-in checks and balances by which nature holds the species within bounds.”

While she held this view of nature, Carson supported biological controls, which involved controlling pests by artificially introducing predators into foreign ecosystems. As Nathan Gregory explained in Silent Spring at 50, Carson’s assertion that using pesticides would upset the balance of nature, while introducing exotic species into an ecosystem would not, is a completely arbitrary position.

Her views on what are today known as invasive species also indicate her apparent inability to recognize that she held the same “arrogant” attitudes toward nature that she claimed were a failing of humanity. Carson advocated active control over natural areas to address what she believed to be problem species or environmental challenges. She objected only to the means of control.

Carson’s use of mystical language to describe nature helps the reader to see this blind spot in her views. “Whenever we substitute something man-made and artificial for a natural feature of the earth, we have retarded some part of man’s spiritual growth,” she wrote in the book Lost Woods. Carson’s pseudo-religious mysticism reveals a disdain for human influence and technological progress far more than it details a scientific comprehension of the alleged needs of the natural world.

Physical evidence refutes the balance of nature paradigm, showing that nature is in a constant state of flux. There is no one perfect, unchanging point toward which nature strives. When environmental activists express their preference for this imaginary state of nature (over concerns for human health and well-being), they’re simply injecting a different human preference—marketed as “natural”—into the discussion.

Unfortunately, this preference for an imaginary natural end state continues to inform environmental law. In the landmark 1972 Supreme Court case Sierra Club v. Morton, both the majority and dissenting opinions held that the goal of environmental law was to preserve nature from human impact. The Wilderness Act of 1964 defines wilderness areas as “where the earth and its community life are untrammeled by man.” The belief that human impact destroys the mystical balance of nature continues to inform the law and, consequently, our lives.

The 2023 Montana “climate kids” lawsuit Held v. the State of Montana highlighted this continued confusion. “Courts in the United States and around the world have begun to recognize that a stable climate is a necessary component of securing for children and our posterity their fundamental rights to life, liberty, and equality,” argued Andrea Rodgers, senior attorney at Our Children's Trust.

In Michigan, the proposed “House Joint Resolution S of 2024” mirrors this naïve argument: “Every person has an inherent and inalienable right to a clean and healthy environment, including clean water, air, and soils; balanced ecosystems; a stable climate; and the preservation of the natural, cultural, recreational, and healthful qualities of the environment.”

Claiming a right to a “clean and healthy environment,” “balanced ecosystems,” and “a stable climate” betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of both natural systems and science. Nature is in constant flux, and climate has never been stable throughout the Earth’s history. Ecosystems are routinely unbalanced by natural phenomena such as ice ages, volcanic eruptions, wildfires, floods, or extreme weather. As a default state, ecosystems untouched by human hands contain many potential threats to human and non-human inhabitants in the form of extreme temperatures, pathogens, predators, diseases, even poisons.

Silent Spring sits at the forefront of an environmental movement that fundamentally misunderstands the human relationship with nature. From that misunderstanding, an even more explicit rejection of human flourishing arose in the Deep Ecology developed by Norwegian philosopher Arne Naess, who credited Silent Spring for inspiring his philosophy.

Naess published the eight founding principles of Deep Ecology in 1984. The first principle advocates for the intrinsic value of nature independent of human ends. Naess argued that we should abandon human flourishing as a guiding ethic for environmental management. We will consider this principle in a future post.

Permission to reprint this blog post in whole or in part is hereby granted, provided that the author (or authors) and the Mackinac Center for Public Policy are properly cited.