Silent Spring

Books talk in a very interesting manner. Like trees, hills, birds, and creeks, books have power to provoke thoughts, teach, and captivate us. Rachel Carson wrote Silent Spring (1962), a contentious environmental classic, while she battled breast cancer. In the summer of 1963, when she was fifty-six and dying of her ailment, she appeared before a Senate committee to testify on pesticides, upon being lambasted by lobbying groups and some in government for being too alarmist in her book to describe the adverse impact of pesticides on the environment.

A senator told Carson at the time, ‘every once in a while in the history of mankind, a book has appeared which has substantially altered the course of history.’ Published more than fifty-five years earlier, Silent Spring is extensively credited with support launch the environmental movement. Carson argued that DDT and other synthetic pesticides, and insecticides were being used in reckless quantities without concern to their impact on the environment, animals, and human health. In her book, she warned of severe consequences for the environment if their use continued to propagate.  

An illustration used in the first of a series of three articles - excerpts from Silent Spring - published in the New Yorker in 1962   

Silent Spring starts with a fable about a town - ‘a town in the heart of America where all life seemed to be in harmony with its surroundings. The town lay in the midst of a checkerboard of prosperous farms, with fields of grain and hillsides of orchards, where white clouds of bloom drifted above the green land.’ And then, she snappishly introduces a strangely ominous paragraph:    

'Then, one spring, a strange blight crept over the area, and everything began to change. Some evil spell had settled on the community; mysterious maladies swept the flocks of chickens, and the cattle and sheep sickened and died. Everywhere was the shadow of death.’                     

The ‘evil spell’ was DDT and its aerial spraying. The synthetic chemical - invented in 1939 to kills fire ants and mosquitos in the US - not only killed bugs but also threatened fish and bird population and could nauseate children, Carson argued. ‘The most alarming of all man’s assaults upon the environment is the contamination of the air, earth, rivers, and seas with dangerous, and even lethal, materials,’ she wrote in her celebrated book. She suggests that we should not pursue to control nature through chemistry, in the name of progress.

The use of DDT was banned in the US by the Environmental Protection Agency in 1972, eight years after Carson died after battling long against breast cancer. In today’s metamodernist era, when the public confidence in government and business leaders is subsiding, Carson’s life serves as an example of one person’s brilliance to stir up positive change. Silent Spring underscores the potential for encouraging others to thoughtful action and to protect plants, animals, and organisms. 

What does philosophy do, anyway?

Does god exist?

What’s reality?

Do we have free will?

What happens after death?

What’s the best moral system?

The list of basic philosophical questions, answers to which philosophers have failed to give even after two thousand and five hundred years of philosophising since Ancient Greece, is long. Such is philosophy. It has never answered a question, never found a solution to a problem.

Philosophy is pretty useless… entirely useless. But then a great number of other grand things in life are also pointless. Art is purposeless. Music is unavailing.

The very purpose to engage in philosophy is to spend time with the very wisest, most perceptive, and weirdest people to have ever lived among us. Also, it’s immensely comforting to realise that however silly, half-baked, and witless the philosophical questions sound, some genius philosophers have most likely discussed or asked them before.

The School of Athens, representing philosophy, by Raphael

Around two millennia ago, Seneca said that philosophy casts and constructs the soul. It commands our life and monitors our conduct. It sits in the driving seat and directs our bridleway as we dither amid uncertainties. Philosophy reaches where science cannot. It has a license to surmise about everything – from epistemology to metaphysics, and in the process of doing it, philosophy comments on and attempts to interpret some of the deepest existential questions.

Answering questions is not philosophy’s liability. Even if philosophy intends to answer something, it simply cannot be answered because there are questions that lie beyond the ambit of our comprehension. However, in Philosophical Progress: In Defence of a Reasonable Optimism (Oxford University Press, 2017), Daniel Stoljar contends that although we revisits the same philosophical topics again and again, the questions we raise about those subjects alter from one time to another, and are gradually being answered.  

Left Behind

‘There is a story behind everything. How a picture got on a wall. How a scar got on your face. Sometimes the stories are simple, and sometimes they are hard and heartbreaking’, says Mitch Albom, in his celebrated philosophical novel For One More Day. Not all stories have lucid opening, middle, and conclusion. Somehow or other, some narratives happen to begin but have no end in sight. This is a story of an eight-year-old boy, named Wang Fuman, who lives in an impoverished, remote village in Yunnan province of China and walks three miles through streams and mountains to get to his school every day.          

On an icy morning in January this year when ‘Little Wang’ reached his school after venturing the usual 90-minute trek, with his eyebrow, hair, and eyelashes, as well as his insubstantially thick winter jacket covered with frost – making him resemble a walking snowman – he immediately became a subject of amusement for his classmates. His hands were swollen and cheeks sharply red and chapped, however.     

A teacher at the school snapped some pictures of the boy and sent them to a few individuals. The teacher or someone else posted those photographs on social media. Thousands of users of the Chinese microblogging website Sina Weibo shared the pictures, whereas they received hundreds of thousands of likes elsewhere on Chinese social media, making the boy an internet sensation within days.

Soon, along with words of sympathy for the hardship of the boy and praise for his fortitude, barrages of donations of warm clothes, heating system, and money to his school and charities poured in. The boy and his family also received cash, toys, books, and clothes. Wang’s father – a migrant worker who worked around 250 miles away and usually visited home twice a year – was offered an employment in his village so he could afford to be with his family.

As many as 95 per cent of school kids at Gaida Primary School in Luodian in Guizhou province of China are left-behind children. (Photo courtesy: People's Daily Online) 

Little Wang is a ‘left-behind child’ – one of more than 60 million children in the countryside of China whose parents, mostly migrant workers, are forced to leave their homes and live in cities to earn livelihood. Wang lives in a dilapidated house with his grandmother and a sister who is two years older than himself. His mother left the family two years ago after growing frustrated with deprived conditions and failing to make ends meet.

While Wang’s internet fame may have comparatively assuaged his family’s difficult socio-economic conditions, his story unfolds the unfortunate situation of tens of millions of left-behind children living not just in China but across the world. A report released by a Chinese NGO in 2017 suggested that around one-third of rural students in China were left-behind children. Even more upsetting, the report anticipated that as many as ten million rural students of the country could have been forsaken by both of their parents.   

The stern circumstances are believed to be causing left-behind children to experience development problems related to mental health, behavior change, and emotional insecurity. Equally pressing to contemplate is that leaving these children behind entails an augmented risk of puncturing the social structure that holds rural communities together. While Wang’s story may have diminutively helped promote social awareness of the poverty scowling at children in poorer, remote, and rural communities, there are millions of other children whose misery finds no voice or representation to put before the world.  

With children accounting for around half of the extreme poor of the world (forty-seven per cent, to be precise, according to UNICEF), more – substantively more – should be done to ensure that they are protected from vulnerabilities and have adequate access to social care and services they need.