Half a century ago, a monumental book was published that created a holistic and balanced view of the environment. The book, Silent Spring by Rachel Carson, was directly influenced by the work of a Michigan State professor and his students, so the MSU Museum chose to honor their work with an exhibit.
Published in 1962, Silent Spring exposed the dangers of over-using chemicals in the environment. “In all truth, there were two periods of environmental awareness: the period before Silent Spring and the period after silent spring,” says MSU Museum director Gary Morgan. “They are two completely different worlds.”
A pesticide called DDT was once used excessively around the world to control mosquito populations, Morgan says. DDT also remedies Dutch elm disease, he says, which was a big problem on MSU’s campus and across America. “The elms were dying en masse,” he says. “One of the most beautiful trees in America was disappearing.”
Morgan says DDT was applied in huge quantities from the ground in sprays and from the air by plane to save the some 5,000 elms on campus. “There are people today who still remember stepping out on campus to be shrouded in clouds of DDT,” he says. Within a year of DDT applications, robins and other birds started dying.
George John Wallace, MSU professor of ornithology, and his students found that there was no successful breeding of birds on campus, says Morgan. Wallace’s findings linked DDT application to the sudden deaths of campus birds, he says, and the truth was rejected by many. “Carson was a real scientist. Wallace was a real scientist,” Morgan says. “Both of them were reluctant warriors, as it were, in this environmental war, but both of them stepped up to the plate.”
Three years before America banned DDT, Morgan says, the Michigan Agricultural Experiment Station took DDT off its recommended list of pesticides. “The whole approach that we take to environmental management and agriculture is far more holistic than it was then,” he says. “It was literally man versus nature.”
Today, pesticides are used in combination with more holistic management techniques, says Morgan. Though organic farming is not a direct result of Carson’s work, he says, the attitudes that fuel the growth of organic farming stem from her publication.
The Environmental Protection Agency did not exist until 1972, Morgan says, and it is often called the extended shadow of Silent Spring. “Her critics labeled her a priestess of nature and argued that she was overwhelmed and too emphatic on this whole issue of balance of nature,” says Morgan, a balance he says we take for granted today.
Another exhibit currently showing at the MSU Museum is Patterns of Inquiry, Morgan says, and it looks at quilts as works of art and how they are being used in contemporary research. The quilts are looked at as expressions and analyses of health and well-being, he says, and how they are connected to art.
“It’s a dynamic show. In fact, when people come in now and see Echoes of Silent Spring and Patterns of Inquiry,” says Morgan, “I think those two exhibits show the wealth and breadth of the museum’s collections and just how dynamic and contemporary the sort of work is that we’re doing.”