6:17 a.m. 39 degrees, wind ESE 2 mph. Sky: light ground fog; cloudless and dull; sunlight filtered through California wildfire smoke; I see it, can't smell it; the second hazy day in a row, a three-thousand-mile long atmospheric buffer. Permanent streams: upper, a once flowering tributary, wilted, reduced to a series of stagnant puddles; lower, leaf-littered, rocky channel, yellow, red, and brown. Wetlands: a light mist, water-starved; swamp maples, red-hot leaves on the southern rim of a cool-green basin; an adult peregrine falcon, interim marshland sentinel, perched on top of the snag, surveying a domain of reeds. Flies off, long, swept-back wings, deep strokes, a sixty-mile per hour air-churning flight, arrow-straight and breathtaking. Flies back. Lands on the snag. Scans for a careless songbird then flies off again; disappears into the morning. Pond: escaping summer heat rises straight up.
By 2020, more than twenty-thousand peregrines spent part of their lives along the coastlines and shorelines of the United States. In Vermont alone, the number of nesting peregrines had risen to over forty pairs, more than the entire eastern United States had in the 1950s when pesticides like DDT had brought the birds to the brink, softening their eggs by interfering with calcium deposition in their shells.
The reversal of fortune can be traced back to the federal ban on the domestic use of DDT. More generally, it can be linked to the birth of the nonprofit watchdog groups such as the Environmental Defense Fund and to Nixon-era legislation like the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, and the Endangered Species Act. In fact, the peregrine's success can be precisely traced back fifty-eight years ago, to June 16, 1962, the day The New Yorker published the first of three installments of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, which spawned the modern environmental movement. It was not an easy birth.
"Perhaps not since the classic controversy over Charles Darwin's The Origin of Species, wrote Carson's editor and biographer Paul brooks, "had a single book been more bitterly attacked by those who felt their interests threatened." Silent Spring, which John Kenneth Galbraith described as one of the most important books of Western literature, ignited a worldwide debate on the direction of technological progress and the degradation of the quality of life. This argument still rages over issues such as climate change and genetic engineering.
The final chapter of Silent Spring, titled "The Other Road," is an unveiled reference to the Robert Frost poem, The Road Not Taken: Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference. Carson begins the chapter: We now stand where two roads diverge, reminding us that we had been traveling down the smoothest, straightest interstate. But at the end lies disaster. By advocating for the other road, Carson eloquently articulated the debate over short-term economic gain versus long-term environmental health.
Her final paragraph could have been written yesterday.
The 'control of nature' is a phrase conceived in arrogance, born of the Neanderthal age of biology and philosophy, when it was supposed that nature exists for the convenience of man. The concepts and practices of applied entomology for the most part date from the Stone Age of science. It is our alarming misfortune that so primitive a science has armed itself with the most modern and terrible weapons, and that in turning them against the insects it has also turned them against the earth.
I think of Rachel Carson as I watch the peregrine rip through wildfire haze.
In VT, we're approaching 48 hours of noticeable haze. The quality of sunlight is very strange.
I can smell it.