In their book Abundance and in press appearances, Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson have made it clear they want to close the book on Rachel Carson’s seminal work.
If JD Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy was the liberal salve for the first Trump administration, Abundance by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompsonis certainly trying for the same cultural ubiquity at the outset of his second term. But in their quest to explain how Democrats went wrong and created the cultural conditions for their 2024 loss, Klein and Thompson take aim at a strange target: environmentalist Rachel Carson.
In their book (pp. 50-51), the authors seem to draw a straight line from Carson’s Silent Spring to the passage of “an arsenal of regulation to slow or outright stop the era of big government building.” The weapons composing this “arsenal” include “the National Historic Preservation Act (1966), the Department of Transportation Act, the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1968, the National Environmental Policy Act, the Clean Air Act of 1970, the Uniform Relocation Assistance and Real Property Acquisition Policies Act, the Noise Control Act of 1972, the Clean Water Act, the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1973 and the Endangered Species Act.” This is a little odd given Carson died shortly after the publication of her momentous work, in the spring of 1964, but the authors are correct in asserting that she was instrumental in the formation of a powerful environmental movement.
In their ongoing book tour, the authors have said a bit more about Carson and their opinions on her influence. During an MSNBC appearance on March 18th, Klein said:
“The left, around the New Left, the back half of the 20th century, the sort of backlash to New Deal liberalism, Ralph Nader and Rachel Carson, like they made it so easy to sue government, to stop government. They didn’t want government to abuse its power. And that had a good reason for existing in the time that it did. But we have different problems now, and we need to renew institutions so they actually work to give people the outcomes government promises.”
Thompson also stated his own similar objections to Carson’s influence in a friendly interview with his Atlantic colleague Jerusalem Demsas:
“And it’s no accident, I think, that Rachel Carson’s book and [Robert] Caro’s book also happened to come out at the same time that [Paul] Ehrlich wrote The Population Bomb. And a lot of environmentalism in the 1960s and 1970s was in cases of fear of and an almost aversion to the idea of masses of people living on this planet. And we have no patience for, certainly, the most racist and hateful aspects of those laws from 60 and 70 years ago.”
Ignoring Klein’s objection to Nader’s influence on politics, something that pervades most of Abundance (though I am personally thankful to him for seatbelts; Nader’s controversial 2000 presidential run is also not invoked), the inclusion of Carson in both of these quotes is bewildering. Silent Spring is not an attack on the New Deal, nor is it some Malthusian work calling for what the authors now refer to as “degrowth.” Silent Spring is an unflinching look at a world in which health was rapidly being compromised in the rush to deploy ever more potent chemicals, including pesticides, herbicides, and insecticides, to maximize agricultural yields without understanding of the long-term impacts on ecosystems and the human body.
Silent Spring is not a detailed compendium of policy prescriptions. The book diagnoses a dire ailment and, eventually, lays out a vision for a better future. This is not unlike Abundance, which pays much more attention to anecdotes and storytelling about the issues we are currently facing than it does laying out detailed policy solutions. If there is any policy prescription laid out in Carson’s book, it is to end the use of DDT and to study and regulate future use of powerful chemicals. I think this is something both Klein and Thompson should understand.
What is even more confusing is that most of Klein and Thompson’s criticisms of the New Left of the 1960s center on the idea that Carson was opposed to the era of big government, and represented a repudiation of the New Deal. While trying to avoid delving into the broader argument about the entire New Left (something that could fill multiple pages by itself), the expansion of the administrative state to more directly address escalating ecological crises is anything but that.
Carson, herself a longtime federal employee, was not opposed to “big government building.” She problematized the government’s enabling of the chemical industry’s recklessness, but again, that can only be construed as an anti-government position if you do not legitimize the role the government should play in reining in industry. Six years after Carson’s death from cancer, the EPA was founded, and it would go on to direct some of the most ambitious government projects of the latter half of the 20th century. While it can be easy to overlook these projects, as their legacy is one of the lack of an impact on the environment, the EPA’s cleanup of environmental disasters is exactly the kind of state capacity that Klein and Thompson should be celebrating.
Carson’s legacy is not one of eroding state capacity. In June 1963, less than a year before she passed away, Carson appeared before the Senate Subcommittee on Reorganization and International Organizations of the Committee on Government Operations, where she laid out six clear proposals for Congress to consider. They were:
“The right of the citizen to be secure in his own home against the intrusion of poisons applied by other persons.”
Supporting “new programs of medical research and education in the field of pesticides.”
Regulations “restricting the sale and use of pesticides at least to those capable of understanding the hazards and of following directions.”
Removing the regulation of pesticides and other chemicals from the jurisdiction of the Department of Agriculture. (She felt both regulating these chemicals’ use while trying to support the maximization of agricultural production was a conflict of interest that resulted in weaker regulation. This demand helped lead to the creation of the EPA.)
A recognition that the creation of such chemicals outpaces the knowledge of their long-term effects, so that the introduction of new agents should only be done when existing methods are insufficient.
Supporting research into new methods of pest control which reduced or even eliminated the use of chemicals.
Not only do many of these stated policies have direct overlap with Abundance’s stated support for scientific advancement and research, but they fail to mention any of the policies for which Carson is vilified by the Abundance authors.
On the 100th anniversary of Carson’s birth, in 2007, Carson’s work was criticized in a bad faith attack by the Competitive Enterprise Institute. An astute young blogger writing in one of our favorite publications, The American Prospect, rightly pointed out the flaws in their work and correctly identified the mission behind it: “It’s about discrediting environmentalists, and environmentalism, more generally.”
Sadly, that same blogger is now engaging in bad-faith attacks against Carson’s legacy, similar to that which he once decried. We’d love to know what Carson has done wrong since 2007 to alter her legacy in the mind of Ezra Klein.
