Where There Is Life by Paul B. Sears (1952), an introduction to ecology, was prominent on the reading list for a freshman interdisciplinary course at Ohio Wesleyan in 1965 called “Conflict and the Human Condition: Man in Nature.” I don’t have my original marked-up copy of the book so will have to rely on memory to recover something of its personal impact at the time.
I was familiar with the pollution Sears described. I grew up in a small industrial town in the 50’s and 60’s where most wage earners worked either at the Ferro-alloy or power plants. Both places paid good wages, and both provided a healthy tax base, which made our tax-financed public school system one of the best in the county. No one in the area seemed to bother about the pollution: the plumes of chemical-filled air that blew through the town as the wind changed directions; the hot, dirty water dumped back again into the river that ran past the town so that no one could swim there or even eat fish that was caught. So accustomed was I to the pollution that I didn’t give much thought to the black soot that settled on laundry hung outside, eating holes in the bed sheets. Nor did anyone seem to connect the pollution with health problems, like my mother’s life-long struggle with lung disease. As for the land itself, we were near enough to Appalachia to suffer the scourge of strip-mining.
I don’t remember much public discussion about these degradations, let alone anything that resembled an environmental movement. Our town had no newspaper. (Well, many people subscribed to one that never got printed because the scam-artist “editor” left town with the paid-up-front subscription money.) The local minister who devoted a Sunday sermon to Silent Spring was forced to find another church. The small professional class included teachers, a doctor, a nurse, a couple of lawyers, and a handful of plant managers. Since the town was incorporated, there was a mayor and a town council, but if any of them felt concern, they did not voice it publically. And who am I to judge them? They thought they were civic-minded public servants. After all, the plants provided good-paying jobs, and because our schools benefitted from the strong tax base, we had good teachers and champion sports teams, always good for public morale. The reigning philosophy seemed to be, as my mother would put it, “you’ve got to go along to get along.”
So the Sears book must have been a real eye-opener, and I do remember some heated arguments during school breaks with my parents and others about what industry had done to our once-attractive little town, with its rolling hillside and river views. However, I could never get past the “it could be worse; at least there are jobs” counter-argument. Indeed, I was later to see what joblessness would do when both plants shut down, and our town, like much of the industrial mid-West, was absorbed into the “rust belt,” a desolation from which it has yet to recover. Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring may have spearheaded an environmental movement, but our town was not part of it, nor was I. As one privileged to get a good education, including the science of ecology, I should have worked harder at “consciousness raising.” Instead, I did everything I could to escape and get on with my own life in some more desirable location, and I regret that.