Beautiful writing and horrific stories, "Silent Spring" 100 pages in

One of the most tragic examples of our unthinking bludgeoning of the landscape is to be seen in the sagebrush lands of the West, where a vast campaign is on to destroy the sages and to substitute grasslands. If ever an enterprise needed to be illuminated with a sense of the history and meaning of the landscape, it is this. For here the natural landscape is eloquent of the interplay of forces that have created it. It is spread before us like the pages of an open book in which we can read why the land is what it is, and why we should preserve its integrity. But the pages lie unread.

The land of the sage is the land of the high western plains and the lower slopes of the mountains that rise above them, a land born of the great uplift of the Rocky Mountain system many millions of years ago. It is a place of harsh extremes of climate: of long winters when blizzards drive down from the mountains and snow lies deep on the plains, of summers whose heat is relieved by only scanty rains, with drought biting deep into the soil, and drying winds stealing moisture from leaf and stem.

As the landscape evolved, there must have been a long period of trial and error in which plants attempted the colonization of this high and windswept land. One after another must have failed. At last one group of plants evolved which combined all the qualities needed to survive. The sage--low-growing and shrubby--could hold its place on the mountain slopes and the plains, and within its small gray leaves it could hold moisture enough to defy the thieving winds. It was no accident, but rather the result of long ages of experimentation by nature, that the great plains of the West became the land of the sage.

Along with the plants, animal life, too, was evolving in harmony with the searching requirements of the land. In time there were two as perfectly adjusted to their habitat as the sage. One was a mammal, the fleet and graceful pronghorn antelope. The other was a bird, the sage grouse--the "cock of the plains" of Lewis and Clark.

The sage and the grouse seem made for each other. The original range of the bird coincided with the range of the sage, and as the sagelands have been reduced, so the populations of the grouse have dwindled. The sage is all things to these birds of the plains. The low sage of the foothill ranges shelters their nests and their young; the denser growths are loafing and roosting areas; at all times the sage provides the staple food of the grouse. Yet is  it a two-way relationship. The spectacular courtship displays of the cocks help loosen the soil beneath and around the sage, aiding invasion by grasses which grow in the shelter of sagebrush.

from pages 64 - 65 of Silent Spring by Rachel Carson

Oddly, I've never read this book though of course it's been around since I was two years old. The first several chapters were fascinating in a shocking sort of way, but now it's getting a bit more bleak; it seems I can better accept the casual deaths of children who are so foolish as to use an empty bag that once held insecticide (alkyl or organic phosphates) to fix a swing only to die soon thereafter as a result of poisoning--their playmates only became ill--than I am the wholesale death of birds, squirrels, rabbits, and cats after deliberate repeated applications of dieldrin (50 times more toxic than DDT and also cheaper) in Illinois that were intended to deal with Japanese beetles. I am, in fact, deliberately taking a break between chapter 7 ("Needless Havoc") and 8 ("And No Birds Sing") as it is all becoming too much.

 But I expected the horrific stories. What comes as a surprise is how beautifully Ms Carson writes. I can see how this book had the impact it did; while she doesn't hold back on the science and the horror, she also writes such evocative passages. 

 The book should be required reading for anyone who thinks that the EPA should be abolished or that we should make America great again by getting rid of those pesky regulations. Hell, everyone should read it just because it is an amazing book.