The story of Earth Day is the story of a book. At least, that is the most commonly told version of how it was founded.
Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring was that book. Published in 1962, it served as the primary catalyst for the founding of Earth Day on April 22nd, 1970. Carson’s work exposed, among other things, the poisoning of our food chain through the widespread use of DDT. By 1967, following up on Carson’s work, scientists formed the Environmental Defense Fund. They lobbied for a ban on DDT.
This, combined with multiple ecological disasters that occurred in the late 60s (the Santa Barbara oil spill and Cuyahoga River fire), energized the public and even mobilized a bi-partisan movement (led by Nixon, who founded the EPA!) that then culminated in the first Earth Day. 20 million Americans participated, which, as Heather Cox Richardson points out, was about 10% of the U.S. population of that time.
But returning to Rachel Carsons, it really was that book that sparked it all. Intriguingly, she had trouble initially finding a publisher, so the book was first serialized in The New Yorker. It was soon then published as a book, and became a best-seller (it sold half a million copies, which if you do the math on that, goes to show how books, though statistically small in number (that’s just one book for 2.5% of the total number of Americans who participated in Earth Day) really do change the world.
A favorite piece of art hanging in my office is a piece of micrography I picked up in Tiberias many years ago. Micrography began as a way to decorate biblical texts, but then emerged as its own style of art, often with the words themselves entirely constituting the image. To me, entirely apart from what the micrographic text “says,” such art utilizing words to form the images communicates language as itself constitutive of reality.
Let’s switch gears for a moment. Have you noticed the proposal in scientific circles that the universe is actually a simulation. It is of course a wild piece of conjecture. Wired calls it, in the article I just linked, a “crackpot” conjecture. However, I’m interested in the proposal not because it is verifiable but because of one of the implications: that somehow everything we experience is actually something akin to computer code.
This interests me, entirely apart from scientific theories concerning a simulated universe, because we can reasonably observe that the majority theory among philosophers in the 21st century, and theologians going on now for thousands of years, is nevertheless that creation, all of the observable world “that is the case,” arises from words or “the word.”
Famously, in the 21st century we had the linguistic turn in philosophy, which runs on two basic tenets: first, that thought is primarily language-based, and perhaps we can’t even consider thought apart from language; and second, the world we know is structured by language.
In Scripture, we can find an analogically similar concept. Genesis reports that God spoke creation. “God said… and there was…” The author of the gospel of John picks up on this, and begins their gospel, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God… ““All things came into being (egeneto) through him [i.e., the Word], and without him not one thing came into being (egeneto)” (NRSV).
Computer code for simulations are such “words.” So even if the simulation hypothesis itself is crackpot, it nevertheless is riffing on a deeper philosophical insight that is widely received in all circles.
I promise I’ll get back around to books in a second, but let’s highlight one more popular notion. Immanuel Kant made the distinction between the phenomenal and noumenal world. The noumenon is the world as it exists apart from our sensing of it. The phenomenal world is the world off of our senses, of our mind. For Kant, quite simply we cannot know the noumenal world but can only know what we perceive.
Much the same can be said of our experience of the world, of creation, in relation to language. We might always ask ourselves: as humans do we have a way of experiencing the created world apart from the language we use to describe it to ourselves and others. And even more fascinatingly, does our varied use of language mean we experience creation differently. Or even more fascinatingly, is it possible that the universe is literally different depending on the language we use.
That is to say, is language ontological.
So what does all of this have to do with Earth Day? Well, as I mentioned at the beginning, the movement that eventually organized Earth Day began with a book. This is to say that anyone impacted by Earth Day, anyone whose commitment to ecological concerns, anyone who continues to observe Earth Day, does so not because of the catalysis of a direct experience of the Earth itself, but because a book written about one form of harm humans were perpetrating on the natural world around them energized such a movement.
So why don’t we call Earth Day “Silent Spring” day?
Well, this also happens in book-centric communities all over the world. Take church, for example. When we gather for church, we most frequently highlight all the communal, human aspects of the gathering. Sometimes it seems we forget (or at least sublimate) that the primary center for most worshipping communities is actually lengthy reading out loud from a book.
I mean yes, sometimes some religious communities have been called “the people of the Book.” But generally speaking, even if there is a book at the center of such gatherings, the book itself humbly situates itself within that gathering without making claims to its ontological significance.
Just think about all the various ways humans organize where “the book” or books play such a role. It’s not just the church that understands Scripture to be the source and norm of its life. We might say (as some prominent literary critics do) that the novel defines Europe. We’ve already noted that Hebrew culture sees language and the book as absolutely basic to the world itself, word as world.
Similarly, in many instances the only remaining thing we have that helps us know the existence of previous cultures are the books that remain. This is at least in part why we continue to read Homer and other texts so closely.
Want to know the Vikings? Read the sagas.
So it is that in spite of some of the many concerns some of us have with fundamentalist implementation of the Bible as a kind of hammer text to force or enforce certain cultural norms, laws, or values, nevertheless even those of us with a “progressive” view of Scripture still believe words matter.
It’s why we’re all out here fighting alongside librarians striving to keep books from being banned, because removing books with good representation is akin to erasure, often a precursor to genocide.
So also with Earth Day. I yearn on a day like today for another movement like what happened in 1970. I worry that all our small efforts to take greater ecological for the planet pale in comparison to the continuing harm Exxon mobile and other oil companies do, driven as they are by the demands of corporate survival.
I wonder what if anything might make for change. Will it be the earth itself? Or will it need to be a word? A book? A serialized monograph in well-designed magazine with a small number of faithful readers?
Is there a word we can speak that will change the world? This is the question, right? And from a theological perspective the answer may very well be: That’s the only way the world changes, because the world is a Word.
Two of the disciples, soon after the crucifixion, were out for a seven mile walk. Perhaps it was a beautiful day, so a pleasant walk in spite of their grief.
Jesus, unrecognized, came alongside and walked with them. After that brief encounter, they said to each other, “Were not our hearts burning within us while he was talking to us on the road, while he was opening the scriptures to us?”
Opening the scriptures to us. There really is something about words in books, no?
I program, therefore I am?
Or perhaps, I write, therefore I was!