I live in a country suburb and the trees are so overgrown on my property that, in summer, it’s gloomy in my house. We are not allowed to cut any trees down; we can only trim their lower branches.
We had a mild winter last year, a kind of drought with very little snow, and a warm spring and summer too.
So it was odd that, one spring day, as I sat outside in our backyard, I noticed something. Or lack of something. No birds.
I asked my husband if he thought it spooky. He agreed.
Well, I looked a little closer and listened a little closer and heard some birds, but still, not the riot I used to hear.
I know we have a cat. But something’s awry.
I say this because I just read a few paragraphs of Rachel Carson’s 1962 masterpiece, Silent Spring.
For some weird reason, this book was a favorite on mine in elementary school. I used to borrow it over and over again.
Carson begins by describing a community with no birds. Hence the Silent Spring.
Reading it now, I can’t believe I actually understood the book, all the sophisticated vocabulary anyway. Carson’s prose is pitch perfect, however, and from the opening pages that I have just read, her ideas are as relevant today as they were in the 60′s. Well, more meaningful. (I always admired pretty prose, even as a child.)
The only part of Silent Spring I actually recalled was the weak egg shells. From the DDT.
It’s not insecticides (or biocides as Carson says they should be called) killing my birds. My community bans pesticides. Indeed, my home is adjacent the first community in Canada to ban pesticides, Hudson. (I lived in that community from 1988 to 2000.)
Back then, I was busy raising kids and tearing my hair out every time my husband got laid off from the TV station and not really following the debate, although I permitted no pesticides in my garden or house. (I remember we had a carpenter ant problem.) I knew there was a local doctor, June Irwin, who spear-headed the campaign.
From what I’ve subsequently learned, one of the reasons this precedent-setting by law got passed at all had to do with the Hudson community being an angl0-community in French Quebec.
The big US companies who came to Quebec to lobby and keep the law from being passed, presented their evidence in English only. (At least that’s what I have been told.)All very odd.
But, still, where are all the birds?
All this has nothing to do with Flo in the City…or does it? Carson’s opening paragraphs explain how modern Man’s accelerated pace of development conflicts with Nature’s ability to adapt. And Flo in the City is about the 1910 era of major technological “advances.” A kind of tipping point, maybe. Or the first of many tipping points.
