Rabbi Noah Farkas Sermons

This fall we celebrate the 50th anniversary of Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring,” the book that launched the modern environmentalist movement. Carson’s genius was in her ability to arrange opaque facts and smith compelling prose in order to make her case. She describes her habit of walking into the woods and listening the chorus of nature, and when on a particular morning, she noticed its absence:

“On the mornings that had once throbbed with the dawn choirs of robins, doves, jays, wrens and scores of other bird voices there was no sound; only silence lay over the fields and woods and marsh.” (Silent Spring)  

To Carson, the silence of nature itself was a wake-up call. “Where had all the birds gone? Why did they leave?” She set off to explore the causes of nature’s demise finding that human progress – modernization, mechanization, and civilization – have made us conquers over nature.   She found a particular villain in the chemical pesticide DDT.   She was aghast that an innovation to help grow supposedly safer food led to the all out destruction of the environment.   Her passionate testimony before Congress helped to convince President Nixon to form the EPA just a few years later.

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