LDS Earth Stewardship discussion

Please join us for an online discussion of Silent Spring, a book which catalyzed the modern American environmental movement fifty years ago. Does the book hold up after half a century? We will discuss it as a group on November 4, but please use this space to share your thoughts and insights until then. Thanks.

Hi Eric, that's an excellent question. One thing that struck me was Carson's use of the word "ecology." She talked about the ecology of the natural world, as well as the internal ecology of our bodies. It doesn't seem to me that we use that word much any more. We give lip-service to the idea that things are interconnected, but I don't feel that the concept permeates our thinking very deeply. Am I wrong?

Perhaps compartmentalization, (e.g., evaluation of pesticides in a narrow context), is a side-effect of conceding that the safety of a chemical should be determined through a series of lab tests on specific animals. Once a chemical has passed the tests required for legal use, it's difficult to go back and argue that there might be other adverse effects, especially if we can't even specify what they are. In our personal lives and conversations we can certainly encourage an interconnected or holistic framing, but that seems a feeble response to the much larger currents of advertising and societal thinking.

I hope you'll join us for our November 4 Zoom discussion.

That's an excellent answer. I do wish people discussed "the ecology" at least as much as they discussed " the environment." The one implies a more full appreciation of the dynamism of nature, while the other would seem to prefer a preservation of the way things are without necessarily understanding or even caring to understand it—which in a way is accurate: we don't fully understand everything happening on this planet, and our policies can't ever truly capture the complexity of the world we're trying to protect. So I suppose businesses, politicians, etc. are at least being honest by saying "environment" but not "ecology."

Speaking of that distinction, I was struck by one section Carson wrote about introducing millions of beetles into an ecosystem in order to fight a certain invasive weed—and this was used as a good example! I'm not sure I agree with her there (What she may have meant is that a biological approach was at least better than the pesticides of the time.) but it struck me as a drastically different attitude than environmentalist movements tend to take. Carson seemed to prefer changing whole ecosystems if done with an understanding of ecology, while many today would prioritize preserving what they see as the pristine, original, untouched ecosystem—an ecosystem which may only exist in imagination. Again, I'm hesitant to condone the beetles example, but that difference of attitudes is interesting to explore.

I still have a ways to go in the book, but yes, I'm excited for the Zoom discussion next week. :)

Eric, I apologize. After incompetently posting my comment twice, I incompetently deleted yours by mistake! I'm investigating whether Goodreads has a mechanism to restore it. Sorry about that!

Oh, ha, no problem, I hadn't even noticed.