I was in college when I first remember hearing the news: honeybees, across the United States, were dying at record rates. Colonies collapsed suddenly, without warning, and beekeepers struggled to maintain their hives. Many reported between 60 and 80% losses in their hive productions. The warning bells rang out as specialists quickly understood what would happen in a world without pollinators - but what was the cause? In the end, Government-sponsored European research found direct evidence that systemic neonicotinoid pesticides resulted in weakened immune systems and damage to the honeybees’ navigation systems. The insecticides used with the desire to protect crop yields seemed poised to destroy them.

Decades earlier in 1962, a female marine biologist named Rachel Carson published a small work called The Silent Spring, detailing her own disturbing discoveries of the havoc wrought by biocides on the natural world. With incredible lucidity, Carson clearlyl exemplifies why this publication spurred the modern environmental movement. Her writing effortlessly pivots from poetic lyricism to scientific accuracy, and her commentary, while never alarmist, reveals the very real dangers around herbicides and pesticides and puts forward a call to action that is hard to ignore.

It is shocking to consider how this work was written more than 50 years ago and yet still carries so much weight. Every scientific writer - every academic writer - would do well to read through Carson’s work to better prepare how they will meet their audience halfway. Carson gives readers the necessary information in a clear, understandable format while also speaking to us as adults. I am blown away by the studies, literature, and longitudinal data referenced in this work. Her argument is rock-solid and her proposals for the future never definitive, only suggested based off of the data accumulated. I wish there were a way to consistently find such clear writers for scientific literature. As many others have said, it would be wonderful to write a modern day companion piece to this, examining the current use of pesticides and herbicides, as well as the fruits of some of the experimental alternatives noted in Carson’s work.

In 2015, the EPA carried a motion to ban many of the pesticides that were shown to threaten the bee populations through their inhibitions on the hives’ complex systems of navigation and food collection. Decades after Rachel Carson’s treatise hit the shelves and galvanized a nation’s environmental consciousness, we still find ourselves returning to the same problems, running in the same circles over and over again. It is sobering to consider. I wish I could say that the beauty and clarity of this work had changed our trajectory, but at best it seems only to have delayed our bull-headed plunge into catastrophe. Through our hubris, the Western world continues to manhandle natural processes as though bending them has no consequences. I only hope that we can find ways to take our hands off the wheel; to step out of the driver’s seat, let go of control, and let the ingenuity of the natural world work its wonder. As Carson herself lamented:

“These extraordinary capacities of life have been ignored by the practitioners of chemical control, who have brought to their task no high minded orientation, no humility before the vast forces with which they tamper. ‘The control of nature’ is a phrase conceived in arrogance...”