Rachel Carson
Article
Rachel Carson is a recurring person in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 3 times across 3 issues between June 04, 2021 and October 24, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as “Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring”; “Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring criticized the USDA’s indiscriminate use of pesticides”; “public consciousness rejected… Rachel Carson”. It most often appears alongside Congress, FAA, Great Stagnation.
Metadata
- Category: People
- Mention count: 3
- Issue count: 3
- First seen: June 04, 2021
- Last seen: October 24, 2024
Appears In
- Your Book Review: Where’s My Flying Car?
- Your Book Review: Public Citizens
- Notes From The Progress Studies Conference
Related Pages
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- Congress (2 shared issues)
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- FAA (2 shared issues)
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- Great Stagnation (2 shared issues)
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- Jane Jacobs (2 shared issues)
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- Ralph Nader (2 shared issues)
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- San Francisco (2 shared issues)
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- Silent Spring (2 shared issues)
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- 1960: The Year The Singularity Was Cancelled (1 shared issues)
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- 1960s (1 shared issues)
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- 1965 (1 shared issues)
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- 1968 Summer Olympics (1 shared issues)
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- 1973 (1 shared issues)
External Links
Source Context
Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.
Hall says the most damaging strain, still common today, is “green fundamentalism”, the idea that human agency over nature is fundamentally bad. An early example is Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, which got DDT banned on the grounds that it was causing cancer; in reality the cancer increase was from smoking, and from technology improving living conditions (the healthier you are, the more likely you’ll survive long enough to get killed by cancer). “The Green religion has essentially superceded Christianity as the default religion of western civilization, especially in academic circles”. Hall is dismissive of climate change, citing an estimate that it will cost only a few percentage of GDP by 2100 even in the worst case. (This is something that always confused me; there’s such a big gap between quantitative economic estimates of climate change and qualitative ones. My impression is the quantitative ones are way too optimistic. Hall does not agree with me). Anyway, he says, climate change is all the more reason to embrace clean nuclear power and flying cars (highways use a lot of land; if flying cars replaced highways, that land could be returned to nature).
But by the 1960s, the cracks in this model were starting to show. A report prepared for President-elect Kennedy outlined the problem of regulatory capture, the process by which agencies intended to regulate private businesses got too close to their subjects and end up serving them instead4. And a new class of liberal intellectuals rose to prominence by pointing out the ways in which the political establishment’s plans sometimes rode roughshod over the citizens they were supposed to serve. Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring criticized the USDA’s indiscriminate use of pesticides, and Jane Jacobs’ grassroots movement successfully blocked Robert Moses—the ultimate agency man—from ramming a highway through the West Village.
Inline links: 4
The speaker said it was complicated, but mentioned a social shift from the techno-optimism of the 1960s to the techno-pessimism of the hippies and paranoid Nixonesque conservatives. The public consciousness rejected The Jetsons in favor of Paul Ehrlich, Rachel Carson, Jane Jacobs, and Ralph Nader, and this probably had downstream effects on lots of things, including regulation.
I mocked the people in 2019 who thought a conference could affect the Gods Of Straight Lines. But it seems like maybe there was something - an idealized spiritual conference in 1971 between Ralph Nader, Jane Jacobs, Rachel Carson, hippies, protectionists, and all those people - that knocked them off their thrones once. So who knows?