"도시와 시골의 인공세계에서 살아가는 사람은 종종 자기가 살고 있는 행성의 진정한 본질과 그 긴 역사(인류가 존재한 것은 그 속에서 찰나에 지나지 않는)에 대한 안목을 잊어버린다. 이 모든 것에 대한 감각은 긴 대양 항해에 나서 날마다 파도가 넘실대는 수평선이 뒤로 물러나는 것을 보고, 밤에는 머리 위의 별들이 움직이는 것을 보고 지구의 자전을 인식하고, 물과 바다만 존재하는 이 세계에 홀로 서서 우주에서 자기가 사는 행성의 외로움을 느낄 때, 가장 생생하게 되살아난다. 그리고 육지에서는 한번도 느껴보지 못했던 사실, 즉 우리가 살고 있는 세계가 물의 세계이며, 대륙은 모든 것을 둘러싸고 있는 바다 수면 위로 잠시 솟아있는 땅덩어리에 불과하다는 사실을 절감하게 된다."
레이첼 카슨,우리를 둘러싼 바다
"In the artificial world of his cities and towns, he often forgets the true nature of his planet and the long vistas of its history, in which the existence of the race of men has occupied a mere moment of time. The sense of all these things comes to him most clearly in the course of a long ocean voyage, when he watches day after day the receding rim of the horizon . . . or when, alone in his world of water and sky, he feels the loneliness of his earth in space. And then, as never on land, he knows the truth that his world is a water world, a planet dominated by its covering mantle of ocean, in which the continents are but transient intrusions of land above the surface of the all-encircling sea."
Rachel Carson, The Sea Around Us
BBC Radio 4 - And No Birds Sing: Rachel Carson and Silent Spring → Listen now (28 mins)
Wed 26 Dec 2012 21:00, BBC Radio 4
Rachel Carson and the legacy of Silent Spring →Link
Fifty years after the publication of the book that laid the foundations for the environmental movement, what have we learned from the biologist who saw the need for science to work with nature?
Robin McKie / The Observer, Sunday 27 May 2012
Near a brook in south-east England, the bird-spotter JA Baker stumbled on a grim little scene in 1961. "A heron lay in frozen stubble. Its wings were stuck to the ground by frost. Its eyes were open and living, the rest of it was dead. As I approached, I could see its whole body craving into flight. But it could not fly. I gave it peace and saw the agonised sunlight of its eyes slowly heal with cloud."
The bird's plight was clearly unnatural. Nor was its fate unique. That year, large numbers of dead birds were found strewn across the countryside. On the royal estate in Sandringham, for example, the toll included thrushes, skylarks, moorhens, goldfinches, sparrowhawks, chaffinches, hooded crows, partridges, pheasants, and wood pigeons. Nationally, more than 6,000 dead birds were reported to the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, a massive leap on previous years. "We were inundated," says the RSPB's conservation director, Martin Harper.
The UK was not alone. For years, reports in the US indicated that numbers of birds, including America's national bird, the bald eagle, were dropping alarmingly. Ornithologists also noted eggs were often not being laid while many that were laid did not hatch. Something was happening to the birds of the western world.
Several causes were proposed – poisons, viruses or other disease agents – but no one had a definitive answer or seemed sure of the cause – with one exception: the biologist Rachel Carson. For most of 1961, she had locked herself in her cottage in Colesville, Maryland, to complete her book, Silent Spring. It would provide an unequivocal identification of the bird killers. Powerful synthetic insecticides such as DDT were poisoning food chains, from insects upwards.
"Sprays, dusts and aerosols are now applied almost universally to farms, gardens, forests and homes – non-selective chemicals that have the power to kill every insect, the 'good' and the 'bad', to still the song of the birds and the leaping of fish in the streams, to coat the leaves with a deadly film and to linger on in the soil – all this though the intended target may be only a few weeds or insects," she wrote. One or two authors had previously suggested modern pesticides posed dangers. None wrote with the eloquence of Carson.
Serialised in the New Yorker during the summer of 1962, Silent Spring was published that September. It remains one of the most effective denunciations of industrial malpractice ever written and is widely credited with triggering popular ecological awareness in the US and Europe. Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace trace their origins directly to Silent Spring. "In the 60s, we were only just waking up to the power that we had to damage the natural world," says Jonathon Porritt, a former director of Friends of the Earth. "Rachel Carson was the first to give voice to that concern in way that came through loud and clear to society." Or as Doris Lessing put it: "Carson was the originator of ecological concerns."
We have much to thank Carson for: a powerful green movement, an awareness that we cannot punish our wildlife indiscriminately and an understanding of the fragility of nature's food chain. But is the environment in better shape today? Have we saved the planet? Or is it in greater peril than ever? Fifty years after Silent Spring was published, as the world warms, sea levels rise and coral reefs crumble, these questions have acquired a new and urgent relevance.
Rachel Carson possessed a rare combination of gifts. She was a brilliant marine biologist and a superb writer whose prose was exquisite in its precision and lyricism. In 1952, she won a US National Book award for The Sea Around Us. Yet her most famous work, Silent Spring, is surprisingly difficult to get through. "It is dense and technical and not a book for the beach," says ornithologist Conor Mark Jameson, author of Silent Spring Revisited, a re-examination of Carson's legacy. "By current standards of science writing, it is awkward stuff."
Literary fashions have changed, of course, though other, intriguing factors give Silent Spring a strange resonance to modern ears. In particular, Carson's relentless style is striking and unexpected, filled as it is with tales of pesticide misuse that often show little variation in tone or detail. There is the slaughter at Clear Lake, California, of grebes and gulls, poisoned by a pesticide used merely to eradicate a harmless gnat. There are the cases of aerial spraying of DDT – to eliminate gypsy moths and fire ants – which wiped out blackbirds and meadowlarks. There are the links between pesticides and genetic damage in humans. And the list goes on. Were she not such a gifted writer, the effect could have been soporific.
Her remorseless approach was deliberate, however. Carson was trying to do more than end an iniquitous practice. She had decided to write "a book calling into question the paradigm of scientific progress that defined postwar American culture," says her biographer Mark Hamilton Lytle. She was amassing her evidence, in short.
It was a brave effort. Even legitimate criticism of government policy was a risky act in the US then. "Science and technology and those who worked in these fields were revered as the saviours of the free world and the trustees of prosperity," says another biographer, Linda Lear. "In Silent Spring, Rachel Carson exposes these experts to public scrutiny and makes it clear that at best they had not done their homework and at worst they had withheld the truth."
From this perspective, the book is not just an ecological alarm call. It is an assault on the paternalism of postwar science, though to be fair to its practitioners, many provided background material and checks of Carson's manuscripts in anticipation of the expected furious response of US industry.
And America's chemical giants did not disappoint. They tried to sue her, the New Yorker and her publisher, Houghton Mifflin. When this approach failed, they launched a $250,000 publicity campaign to rubbish Carson and her science. She was derided for being hysterical and unscientific and for being an unmarried woman. "She was an alarmist, they claimed," Lear states. "She kept cats and loved birds. Even a former US secretary of agriculture was known to wonder in public 'why a spinster with no children was so interested in genetics'. Her unpardonable offence was that she had overstepped her place as a woman."
Carson was now suffering from breast cancer and the effects of her radiotherapy. Yet she fought back. At the Women's National Press Club, she denounced the links that had been established between science and industry. "When a scientific organisation speaks," she asked, "whose voice do we hear – that of science or of the sustaining industry?" The question remains as pertinent today as it did in 1962.
The furore had one beneficial effect for Carson. Sales of Silent Spring soared, reaching a million by her death in April 1964. Pressed for his views on it, President John F Kennedy admitted an interest and later instructed his science advisory committee to investigate her claims. Its report vindicated Carson. Widespread use of pesticides was allowing poisons to build up in the food chain, posing a real risk to humans. Ten years and two presidents later, the production of DDT and its use in agriculture was banned in the US. Britain officially banned its use some years later.
Carson's opponents have long memories, however. Websites, many established by rightwing institutions backed by US industry, claim that she was a mass murderer who killed more people than the Nazis, for example. The DDT ban was responsible, these sites argue, for the deaths of countless Africans from malaria that would have been controlled had the west not stopped making the pesticide.
The claims are rejected by science historians Naomi Oreskes and Erik M Conway. DDT was banned not just because it was accumulating in the food chain but because mosquitoes were developing resistance to it, they state. Nevertheless, groups still blame Carson for the current blight of malaria.
US climate scientist Michael E Mann offers another explanation for this perverse belief. "Those who oppose the environment movement have developed a special strategy: 'Whenever you get the chance: attack the icon.' Then you can say the whole cause must be tainted because you have thrown so much mud at the figurehead," says Mann, himself a victim of internet vilification over his climate research. "Rachel Carson is certainly an icon. Hence her treatment. Her story has so many resonances."
In fact, Carson's warnings are still highly relevant, both in terms of the specific threat posed by DDT and its sister chemicals and to the general ecological dangers facing humanity. "The seas are now witnessing the land horrors she described in Silent Spring," says oceanographer Callum Roberts, of York University. "The seas are the ultimate sinks. Chemicals get washed out of the soil and into streams and rivers. They should settle on the sea bed and stay there. However, fishing has become so intense, with boats dredging up scallops and bottom-welling fish all the time, that we are constantly ploughing up these toxins, including DDT, and stirring them back into the water."
Roberts points to the bottlenose dolphins of Sarasota Bay, Florida, as typical victims. "When a mother dolphin has her first offspring, she transfers a huge part of her body's burden of chemicals, including toxins, to her first-born. As a result, 70% of first-born calves die within a year."
Nor have matters improved on land. Neonicotinoids, insecticides used in seed dressing, have been linked to colony collapse disorder in honeybees, a condition that saw 800,000 hives wiped out in the US in 2007 alone, while vultures in Asia have been wiped out by the chemical diclofenac used on farms. As Carson wrote: "Chemical war is never won and all life is caught in its violent crossfire."
It is a lesson that seems to have been lost over the decades, however. "Carson believed we had to have a balance between ourselves and nature but the urge to have a macho-domination of the planet seems just as strong as it was in 1962," says Porritt. "We have made much less progress than we hoped for then."
Jameson agrees. "Was she right? Emphatically so. Was she heeded? Well, over DDT, she was. But her broad message, that we need to act in moderation and achieve a balance with nature, has still not been fully grasped."
Martin Harper of the RSPB is also cautious. "It took 10 years to get DDT banned after its effects had been demonstrated. And similarly today, when warned about a chemical's danger, governments wait until research results are unequivocal. Then they suggest industry takes voluntary action. Only when that fails does it issue a ban, years too late."
Rachel Carson's legacy is therefore difficult to assess. More than any other individual, she helped raise awareness about humanity's potential to wreak havoc on nature and we should be grateful. But it is equally clear that the planet is in a far worse state today than it was in 1962. The population has risen from 3.1 billion to 6.9 billion, seas are being drained of fish, wild places destroyed and wildlife devastated.
"I think she would have been horrified about the state of the planet today," Porritt admits. "Silent Spring outlined a clear and important message: that everything in nature is related to everything else. Yet we have not taken that idea on board or fully appreciated its significance. In that sense, we have let her down."
Rachel Carson Didn’t Kill Millions of Africans →Link
How the 50-year-old campaign against Silent Spring still distorts environmental debates.
By William Souder / SEPT. 4 2012 5:02 AM
Silent Spring, Rachel Carson’s landmark warning about the indiscriminate use of pesticides, turns 50 this month. By extension, that puts the environmental movement also at the half-century mark—along with the bitter, divisive argument we continue to have over both the book and the movement it spawned. The terms of that argument, which emerged in the brutal reaction to Silent Spring from those who saw it not as a warning but as a threat, haven’t changed much. And they leave us with a vexing question: Why do we fight? How is it that the environment we all share is the subject of partisan debate? After all, the right and the left inhabit the same planet, even if it doesn’t always seem that way.
Carson’s book was controversial before it even was a book. In June 1962, three long excerpts were published by The New Yorker magazine. They alarmed the public, which deluged the Department of Agriculture and other agencies with demands for action, and outraged the chemical industry and its allies in government. In late August 1962, after he was asked about pesticides at a press conference, President Kennedy ordered his science adviser to form a commission to investigate the problems brought to light, the president said, by “Miss Carson’s book.” A month later, when Silent Spring was published, the outlines of the fight over pesticides had hardened. Armed with a substantial war chest—Carson’s publisher heard it was $250,000—pesticide makers launched an attack aimed at discrediting Silent Spring and destroying its author.
The offensive included a widely distributed parody of Carson’s famous opening chapter about a town where no birds sang, and countless fact-sheets extolling the benefits of pesticides to human health and food production. Silent Spring was described as one-sided and unbalanced to any media that would listen. Some did. Time magazine called the book “hysterical” and “patently unsound.”
Carson’s critics pushed her to the left end of the political spectrum, to a remote corner of the freaky fringe that at the time included organic farmers, food faddists, and anti-fluoridationists. One pesticide maker, which threatened to sue if Silent Spring was published, was more explicit: Carson, the company claimed, was in league with “sinister parties” whose goal was to undermine American agriculture and free enterprise in order to further the interests of the Soviet Union and its Eastern European satellites. The word Communist—in 1962 the most potent of insults—wasn’t used, but it was understood. Silent Spring, said its more ardent detractors, was un-American.
And there the two sides sit 50 years later. On one side of the environmental debate are the perceived soft-hearted scientists and those who would preserve the natural order; on the other are the hard pragmatists of industry and their friends in high places, the massed might of the establishment. Substitute climate change for pesticides, and the argument plays out the same now as it did a half-century ago. President Kennedy’s scientific commission would ultimately affirm Carson’s claims about pesticides, but then as now, nobody ever really gives an inch.
Carson was also accused of having written a book that, though it claimed to be concerned with human health, would instead contribute directly to death and disease on a massive scale by stopping the use of the insecticide DDT in the fight against malaria. One irate letter to The New Yorker complained that Carson’s “mischief” would make it impossible to raise the funds needed to continue the effort to eradicate malaria, and its author wondered if the magazine’s legendary standards for accuracy and fairness had fallen. Apparently unaware of the distinction between science authors and nudists, the letter writer referred to Carson as a “naturist.”
The claim that Rachel Carson is responsible for the devastations of malaria, especially in sub-Saharan Africa, has gained renewed traction in recent years. The American Enterprise Institute and other free-market conservatives have defended the safety and efficacy of DDT—and the claim of Carson’s “guilt” in the deaths of millions of Africans is routinely parroted by people who are clueless about the content of Silent Spring or the sources of the attacks now made against it. The Competitive Enterprise Institute, a limited-government, free-enterprise think tank, maintains the website rachelwaswrong.org, which details Carson’s complicity in the continuing plague of malaria. In 2004, the late writer Michael Crichton offered a bite-sized and easy-to-remember indictment of Carson’s crime: “Banning DDT,” Crichton wrote, “killed more people than Hitler.” This was dialogue in a novel, but in interviews Crichton made it clear this was what he believed.
Rachel Carson, who stoically weathered misinformation campaigns against her before her death from breast cancer in 1964, would find the current situation all-too predictable. As she said once in a speech after the release of Silent Spring, many people who have not read the book nonetheless “disapprove of it heartily.”
Rachel Carson never called for the banning of pesticides. She made this clear in every public pronouncement, repeated it in an hourlong television documentary about Silent Spring, and even testified to that effect before the U.S. Senate. Carson never denied that there were beneficial uses of pesticides, notably in combatting human diseases transmitted by insects, where she said they had not only been proven effective but were morally “necessary.”
“It is not my contention,” Carson wrote in Silent Spring, “that chemical insecticides must never be used. I do contend that we have put poisonous and biologically potent chemicals indiscriminately into the hands of persons largely or wholly ignorant of their potentials for harm. We have subjected enormous numbers of people to contact with these poisons, without their consent and often without their knowledge.”
Many agreed. Editorializing shortly after The New Yorker articles appeared, the New York Times wrote that Carson had struck the right balance: “Miss Carson does not argue that chemical pesticides must never be used,” the Times said, “but she warns of the dangers of misuse and overuse by a public that has become mesmerized by the notion that chemists are the possessors of divine wisdom and that nothing but benefits can emerge from their test tubes.”
Carson did not seek to end the use of pesticides—only their heedless overuse at a time when it was all but impossible to escape exposure to them. Aerial insecticide spraying campaigns over forests, cities, and suburbs; the routine application of insecticides to crops by farmers at concentrations far above what was considered “safe;” and the residential use of insecticides in everything from shelf paper to aerosol “bombs” had contaminated the landscape in exactly the same manner as the fallout from the then-pervasive testing of nuclear weapons—a connection Carson made explicit in Silent Spring.
“In this now universal contamination of the environment,” Carson wrote, “chemicals are the sinister and little-recognized partners of radiation in changing the very nature of the world—the very nature of its life.”
The Competitive Enterprise Institute—to its credit—acknowledges that Carson did not call for the banning of pesticides in Silent Spring. But they claim Carson’s caveat about their value in fighting disease was so overwhelmed by her general disapproval of their use that “negative publicity” around Silent Spring halted the use of DDT against malaria, notably in sub-Saharan Africa, where some 90 percent of the world’s malaria cases occur.
It’s true that Carson found little good to say about DDT or any of its toxic cousins—the chlorinated aromatic hydrocarbon insecticides developed in the years after World War II and after the Swiss chemist Paul Muller had won a Nobel Prize for discovering DDT. But it’s a stretch to see how the mood surrounding Silent Spring was the prime cause of DDT’s exit from the fight against malaria. And, as the New York Times and other publications proved, it was understood by anyone who took time to read Silent Spring that Carson was not an absolutist seeking to stop all pesticide use.
DDT had been effective against malaria in Europe, in Northern Africa, in parts of India and southern Asia, and even in the southern United States, where the disease was already being routed by other means. But these were mostly developed areas. Using DDT in places like sub-Saharan Africa, with its remote and hard-to-reach villages, had long been considered problematic. It was an old story and one still repeated: Africa was everybody’s lowest priority.
And in any case, the World Health Organization had begun to question its malaria-eradication program even before Silent Spring was published. One object lesson was that the heavy use of DDT in many parts of the world was producing new strains of mosquitoes resistant to the insecticide. Much as it can happen with antibiotics, the use of an environmental poison clears susceptible organisms from the ecosystem and allows those with immunity to take over. The WHO also faced declining interest in the disease among scientists and sharp reductions in funding from the international community.
When the recently created Environmental Protection Agency banned DDT for most domestic uses in 1972, this ruling had no force in other parts of the world and the insecticide remained part of the international anti-malaria arsenal. The United States continued to manufacture and export DDT until the mid-1980s, and it has always been available from pesticide makers in other countries.
One result is that DDT is still with us—globally adrift in the atmosphere from spraying operations in various parts of the world, and also from its continuing volatilization from soils in which it has lain dormant for decades. The threat of DDT to wildlife—as a deadly neurotoxin in many species and a destroyer of reproductive capabilities in others—has never been in doubt. Carson’s claims in Silent Spring about DDT’s connection to human cancer and other disorders have not been completely resolved. The National Toxicology Program lists DDT as “reasonably anticipated to be a human carcinogen.” The same holds for two of its common break-down products, DDD and DDE, which are also suspected of causing developmental problems in humans.
These are cloudy but worrisome presumptions. DDT is stored in fat tissues—including ours—and that storage amplifies with repeated exposures over time, as well as through food chains, with unpredictable consequences. We walk around with our personal body-burden of DDT, a poison we still consume both from its decades-old residuals and its ongoing uses. If Rachel Carson hoped to end the use of DDT and our exposure to it, she did a lousy job.
In 2006, the World Health Organization announced a renewed commitment to fighting malaria with DDT, mainly in Africa—where the WHO had never lifted its approval for this purpose. The move was backed by environmental groups, as it surely would have been by Rachel Carson had she been with us still.
What is the legacy of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring? →Link
Fifty years after its publication, Rachel Carson's investigation into pesticides still divides opinion.
Leo Hickman / Thursday 27 September 2012 18.10
Rachel Carson's Silent Spring Reaches Its 50th Anniversary →Link
How Silent Spring Became the First Shot in the War Over the Environment. 50 years old this month, Rachel Carson's book Silent Spring helped kickstart the environmental movement and led the U.S. to ban the pesticide DDT. So why do some people blame Carson for millions of malaria deaths in Africa?
By Bryan Walsh @bryanrwalshSept. 25, 2012
[동아광장/홍성욱]‘침묵의 봄’에 대한 오해와 진실 →기사링크
홍성욱 서울대 생명과학부 교수 / 기사입력 2012-11-08 03:00:00
필자는 올해 이 난의 첫 칼럼을 레이철 카슨과 토머스 쿤으로 시작했다. 환경과 과학 분야에 큰 영향을 미친 ‘침묵의 봄’과 ‘과학혁명의 구조’가 딱 50년 전인 1962년에 출판되었기 때문이다. ‘침묵의 봄’은 살충제 DDT가 생태계의 먹이사슬을 통해 생명체에 축적되면서 환경에 미칠 수 있는 끔찍한 영향을 경고한 책으로 DDT의 금지라는 정부의 규제를 이끌어 냈고 전 세계적인 환경운동을 촉발하는 기폭제가 되었다.
DDT의 발명자 파울 뮐러는 1948년에 그 공로로 노벨상을 받았고, 당시 DDT는 마법 같은 과학의 성과로 간주되고 있었다. 카슨이 DDT를 비판하자 이를 만들던 화학회사들은 출판사를 고소하겠다며 엄포를 놓았고, 과학자들 중에서도 카슨이 화학이나 농학을 공부하지 않은 비전문가라고 비판하는 사람들이 등장했다. 그렇지만 DDT의 위험을 평가하는 역할을 맡은 미국 대통령 과학자문위원회는 여러 정보를 수합하고 평가한 뒤에 살충제 사용을 제한하는 행동에 즉각 돌입해야 한다고 결론을 내렸다. 이후 많은 논의 끝에 미 연방정부는 1972년에 DDT를 금지했다.
그런데 이런 긍정적인 평가와는 너무나도 다른, 극단적으로 부정적인 평가도 존재한다. 카슨의 ‘침묵의 봄’이 DDT를 금지시킴으로써 아프리카와 같은 저개발국에서 말라리아가 창궐했고, 결과적으로 수백만 명의 사람을 죽게 만들었다는 것이다. 그녀의 책은 환경을 구했을지는 모르지만, 과학을 무시한 대가로 사람을 희생시켰다는 것이다. 이들은 지금 우리에게 필요한 것은 DDT를 부활시키는 것이라고 외친다. 심지어 카슨이 히틀러나 스탈린보다도 더 많은 사람을 죽였다는 선정적인 얘기도 심심치 않게 들린다.
사실 조금만 생각해 봐도 이런 평가에는 문제가 있음을 알 수 있다. DDT를 금지한 것은 미국이었지, 열대 지역의 저개발 국가가 아니었다. 열대 지역의 많은 저개발 국가에서 DDT는 계속 합법적으로 사용되었고, 지금도 사용되고 있다. DDT의 사용이 전 세계적으로 줄어든 것은 그것을 금지해서가 아니라 그 효용이 떨어졌기 때문인데, 그 가장 중요한 이유는 말라리아를 유발하는 모기에게 DDT 내성이 생겼기 때문이다. DDT를 넓은 지역에 살포해서 모기를 죽이면, 내성을 가진 소수의 모기가 그 다음 해에 번식하고 이때는 DDT를 더 강하게 살포해야 한다. 이렇게 몇 년만 지나면 아무리 강한 살충제를 써도 잘 죽지 않는 모기가 창궐한다. 스리랑카가 말라리아 박멸에 실패한 것은 DDT를 금지해서가 아니라 모기가 내성을 발전시켰기 때문이다.
‘카슨 죽이기’의 근원지는 미국이다. 1990년대에 미국의 ‘건전과학진흥연맹’의 스티븐 밀로이는 DDT 금지가 수백만 명을 죽였다는 얘기를 퍼뜨리기 시작했다. 밀로이와 ‘건전과학진흥연맹’은 담배회사에서 지원을 받아 담배가 폐암을 유발하지 않는다는 주장을 폈던 것으로 유명하다. 그는 지구 온난화를 ‘사기극’이라고 부정하며, 산성비와 오존홀에 대한 과학적 합의를 ‘쓰레기 과학(정크 사이언스)’이라고 비난한다.
카슨을 공격한 과학자 딕시 레이는 오존홀을 부정한 것으로 잘 알려져 있다. 미국의 우파단체인 경쟁기업연구소는 카슨이 틀렸다고 주장한 사람을 노벨 평화상 후보로 밀었고, 미국기업연구소는 카슨을 비난한 마이클 크라이턴의 작품을 선전했다. 카슨을 공격하는 또 다른 연구소인 하트랜드연구소는 지구 온난화를 집요하게 공격한다. 이들은 과학기술이 문제를 낳을 수 있다는 것을 인정하지 않고, 시장의 실패를 인정하지 않으며, 환경이나 건강을 고려한 정부의 규제는 무조건 나쁜 결과를 낳는다고 믿는 사람들이다.
‘침묵의 봄’은 생태계를 무시하고 과학기술을 오용했을 때 생길 수 있는 부작용이 얼마나 위험할 수 있는가를 일깨워 줌으로써, 사람들이 세상을 새롭게 볼 수 있게 만든 ‘혁명적인’ 책이었다. 그녀는 살충제가 인간의 건강에 미치는 영향에 대해서는 아주 제한된 얘기만을 했지만, 2005년 의학저널 ‘랜싯’에 나온 한 논문은 DDT가 조산, 저체중아 출산, 유아 사망 등과 밀접한 상관관계가 있음을 주장하고 있으며, 2007년에 출판된 다른 논문은 1940, 50년대에 DDT에 노출되었을 여성들의 유방암 발병률이 다른 여성들에 비해 5배 높다는 점을 보이고 있다. 이런 연구들은 환경에 미친 피해가 인간에게까지 이를 수 있다는 카슨의 주장이 과학적으로도 틀리지 않았음을 보여준다.
‘카슨 죽이기’ 캠페인처럼 근거 없는 엉터리 주장도 ‘과학’의 외피를 쓰고 등장했을 때 그럴듯하게 보이면서 사람들을 현혹할 수 있다. 지난 몇 년을 돌이켜 보면 우리 사회에서도 ‘과학’의 이름으로 맹신을 요구하는 목소리가 점점 커지고 있다. 이런 때일수록 더 필요한 것은 균형감을 가지고 여러 주장의 근거를 차분하게 따져보는 것이다. 이것이 진정한 과학적 사고이자 방법이다.
[아침을 열며/4월 25일] 침묵의 봄, 소란한 여름 →기사링크
조효제 성공회대 사회과학부 교수 / 입력시간 : 2012.04.24 21:02:07
올해는 환경을 생각하는 사람들에게 잊지 못할 해로 기록된다. 레이첼 카슨의 <침묵의 봄>이 나온 지 꼭 반세기가 되기 때문이다. <침묵의 봄>은 살충제가 자연과 인간에게 끼치는 가공할 폐해를 과학적이면서도 시적으로 고발한 명저다. 인간이 자연을 지배할 권리가 있고 자연은 오로지 인간을 위해 존재한다고 착각하던 시절에 말 그대로 혁명의 물꼬를 튼 책이다.
모든 혁명이 그렇듯 <침묵의 봄> 역시 엄청난 저항에 맞닥뜨려야 했다. 살충제 생산업계는 이른바 전문가, 과학자, 친기업적 언론인들을 총동원해 카슨의 메시지에 융단폭격을 가했다. 비과학적이다, 악의에 찬 반기업적 선전이다, 사이비 환경보호론자의 환상이다 등등. 심지어 자본주의 경제를 타격하려는 공산주의자의 책동이라고까지 했다. 당시 뉴욕타임스는 '침묵의 봄, 소란한 여름'이라는 제하의 기사에서 <침묵의 봄>이 미국 사회에 폭탄을 터뜨렸다고 보도했다. 찰스 다윈의 <종의 기원> 이래 가장 큰 논란을 불러일으킨 과학저술이라는 평까지 나왔다.
발칵 뒤집힌 화공약품 산업과는 달리 대중의 반응은 호의적이었다. 책이 나온 바로 그 해 말까지 전미 각 주에서 40여종이 넘는 살충제 규제법안이 제출되었고, 케네디 행정부의 과학자문위원회는 살충제와 제초제의 오남용을 경고하는 보고서를 발표했다. <침묵의 봄> 출간, 그리고 몇 년 뒤 아폴로 8호가 우주에서 찍어 전송한 지구 사진, 이 두 사건은 현대 환경운동의 탄생을 촉진한 산파요 아이콘이 되었다.
공교롭게도 <침묵의 봄> 50주년을 맞은 봄날, 환경 가치를 내세운 정당이 정식으로 출마한 총선이 치러졌다. 녹색당이 얻은 득표율은 0.48%, 지지자 10만3,000명. 우리의 환경의식을 상징적으로 보여준 결과였다. 탈핵, 탈토건, 농업, 생명, 평화, 인권 등 하나같이 절박하고 중요한 사안들인데 결국 기존 정당체제의 철옹성을 넘지 못했다. 왜 그럴까? 우리 사회에서 환경과 녹색가치를 주류 의제로 만들기가 왜 그렇게 어려운지를 근본에서 성찰할 필요가 있다.
여러 이유가 있겠지만 가장 중요하게는 극단적으로 상품화된 사회 시스템 그리고 그것을 인지적으로 뒷받침하는 교육제도를 들 수 있을 것이다. 모든 가치들이 다 그렇지만 인간의 천성에 의해 자동적으로 받아들여지는 가치는 없다. 어떤 가치가 규범으로 수용되려면 어릴 적부터 가르쳐야 하고 사회적으로 장려해야 한다. 환경도 마찬가지다. 생명과 자연은 돈 가치로 환원될 수 없는 특별한 가치라는 점을 강조 또 강조해야 하는 것이다. 어린 아이가 한 글자씩 배워 문자를 깨치듯, 환경가치라는 문자, 즉 '환경 문해'를 적극적으로 교육해야 한다. 하지만 현실은 정반대다. 아직도 경제 성장률이 종교처럼 숭배되고, 정부가 앞장서서 전국의 하천을 파헤치면서 그것을 녹색성장이라고 우기는 나라다.
<침묵의 봄>은 봄이 왔지만 더 이상 새들의 지저귀는 소리가 들리지 않는 마을을 섬뜩하게 그렸다. 먼 나라, 먼 과거의 이야기가 아니다. 오늘 이 땅의 철새 도래지에서 새떼들의 합창소리가 사라지고 있다. <침묵의 봄>은 '가지 않은 길'이라는 장으로 끝난다. 카슨은 말한다. "우리는 지금 두 갈림길에 서 있다. 하지만 로버트 프로스트의 유명한 시에 등장하는 갈림길과 달리 어떤 길을 선택하든 결과가 마찬가지이지는 않다. 우리가 오랫동안 여행해온 길은 놀라운 진보를 가능케 한 너무나 편안하고 평탄한 고속도로였지만 그 끝에는 재앙이 기다리고 있다. '아직 가지 않은' 다른 길은 지구의 보호라는 궁극적인 목적지에 도달할 수 있는 마지막이자 유일한 기회다."
<침묵의 봄>이 나온 후 미국의 대법관 윌리엄 더글러스는 인류의 독살을 막으려면 환경 권리장전이 필요하다고 했다. 그러한 권리장전은 거저 주어지지 않는다. 50년 전 소란한 여름을 반환경 유해산업이 주도했다면, 21세기엔 시민들이 환경 문해를 요구하는 소란한 여름을 주도해야 한다. 그게 침묵의 봄을 막고, 어둠의 개발 카르텔을 깨는 유일한 길이다.
[과학 오디세이]‘침묵의 봄’과 ‘시끄러운 여름’을 넘어서 →기사링크
이상욱 한양대 교수·철학 / 입력 : 2012-05-20 21:40:06
세상을 바꾸었다고 말할 수 있는 책은 드물다. 이런 저런 방식으로 세상에 영향을 준 책은 많을 것이다. 하지만 <성경>이나 <자본론>처럼 수많은 사람의 생각과 행동에 영향을 끼쳐 결국은 역사의 큰 흐름을 바꾸는 데까지 이른 책은 그리 많지 않다. 한편 고전이라 평가되는 책은 오랜 세월 그 가치가 입증되어 온 책이다. 하지만 고전 중에는 <그리스·로마 신화>처럼 그 영향에서 특별한 방향성을 찾기 어렵거나 <채근담>처럼 실제 사회에 끼친 영향이 상대적으로 미미한 경우가 대부분이다.
이런 의미에서 레이첼 카슨이 1962년 출판한 <침묵의 봄>은 독특하다. 고전의 반열에 들면서도 세계를 바꾸었다고 말할 수 있는 책이기 때문이다. 이 책의 원제목은 ‘Silent Spring(조용한 봄)’이다. 카슨은 봄이 왔는데도 새가 울지 않는(그래서 ‘조용한’) 가상 상황에 대한 서정적 묘사로 책을 시작한다. 그 이후 내용은 어떻게 이런 상황이 발생할 수 있는지에 대한 치밀한 분석이다.
카슨은 수많은 실증적 자료에 입각한 과학적 분석을 통해 합성물질의 과다사용의 문제점과 환경보존의 필요성에 대한 자신의 주장을 전개한다. 봄이 조용해진 이유는 새의 알껍질이 얇아져서 어린 새가 부화하지 못했기 때문이다. 알껍질이 얇아진 이유는 어미새의 몸에 축적된 DDT와 같은 살충제 때문이다. 살충제를 뿌린 사람들은 특별히 ‘조용한’ 봄을 원했던 것이 아니다. 살충제는 당연히 해충을 박멸하려고 살포되었다. 하지만 살충제는 ‘의도되지 않았던’ 여러 부작용을 가져왔다. 그 부작용의 끔찍함을 카슨은 ‘조용한 봄’으로 상징화한 것이다.
<침묵의 봄>은 환경운동 분야에서 소로의 <월든>이나 레오폴드의 <모래군의 열두 달>과 함께 고전으로 평가된다. 소로와 레오폴드의 책도 환경운동이나 생태사상에 지대한 영향을 끼쳤지만 카슨의 책처럼 세계를 바꾸지는 못했다. 카슨의 책이 출간된 후 케네디 대통령은 과학자문위원회에 살충제 사용실태에 대한 조사를 주문했고 자문위원회는 카슨의 입장을 옹호하는 취지의 보고서를 제출했다. 책의 대중적 인기와 영향력은 CBS 방송국이 몇몇 광고주의 협박에도 굴하지 않고 <침묵의 봄>의 내용에 기반한 다큐멘터리를 제작·방영하면서 더욱 높아졌다. 결국 농무부, 화학 회사 등의 조직적 방해에도 불구하고, 1964년 ‘야생보호법’, 1969년 ‘환경정책법’이 미 의회를 통과했고 화학물질의 사용을 규제하는 여러 법률 제정으로 이어졌다.
일부 논자들은 카슨의 <침묵의 봄>이 현대 과학의 근본적 문제를 지적하며 자연의 경이를 재발견할 것을 주창했다고 파악한다. 하지만 이러한 평가는 카슨의 생각이나 책 내용 어느 것과도 일치하지 않는다. 평생 과학과 글쓰기를 함께 사랑하며 이 둘을 어떻게 조화시킬 것인지를 고민했던 카슨은 자신이 과학적 분석을 통해서만 알아낼 수 있었던 사실에 자부심을 가졌다. 자연에 대한 글쓰기에 있어서도 지나친 의인화를 삼가고 관련 과학 전문가가 읽어도 사실적으로 틀린 부분을 찾아내지 못할 만큼 ‘정확하게’ 내용을 전달하려 애썼다.
카슨이 기존 환원적 과학 연구의 문제점을 알아낸 것도 환원적 연구를 통해서였다. 카슨은 실험실에서 특정 인과 관계만을 고립시켜 탐구한 후 그 결과가 복잡한 인과 관계가 얽혀 있는 생태계에서도 여전히 타당하리라 기대하는 과학계의 관행을 비판했다. 이 비판 역시 시적 표현이 아니라 과학 연구에서 나왔다. 일반 시민을 위한 자신의 책에 카슨이 구태여 유기화합물의 구조식을 포함시킨 것에는 이유가 있었다. 카슨은 왜 합성살충제가 예기치 않은 부작용을 가져오는지의 과학적 메커니즘을 독자들에게 이해시키고 싶었던 것이다.
결국 카슨은 어떤 의미에서도 반과학적 자연주의자가 아니었다. 누구나 조금만 찾아보면 알 수 있는 확실한 사실을 용기 있게 말한 내부 고발자는 더더욱 아니었다. 그보다는 특유의 세심한 관찰력, 핵심적 자료에 접근할 수 있었던 정부과학자로서의 기회, 다양한 과학적 결과로부터 패턴을 읽어낼 줄 아는 통찰력, 과학 내용을 대중에게 쉽고 호소력 있게 풀어낼 수 있는 빼어난 글솜씨, 자신이 중요하다고 생각하는 바를 대중에게 알리려는 사명감을 고루 갖춘 행동하는 과학 지식인이었다.
화학물질 사용에 대한 카슨의 견해는 출간 당시 입수 가능한 증거에 의해 확실하게 입증될 수 있는 것은 아니었다. 그런 이유로 당시 평자들은 <침묵의 봄>이 ‘시끄러운 여름’을 가져왔다고 말할 정도였다. <침묵의 봄> 출간 50주년이 되는 지금 우리는 분명 카슨이 만든 세계에서 살고 있다. 우리가 만들어갈 가을이 얼마나 풍요로울지는 가치 이쓴 삶에 대한 보다 현명한 생각만큼이나 생태계가 작동하는 방식에 대한 더 많은 과학지식에 달려있을 것이다.