Ecology, Race, and the Making of Environmental Publics: A Dialogue with Silent Spring in South Africa

Abstract

The silence, in Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, is that of birds in the aftermath of a chemical warfare on pests and weeds. But her book is also about another kind of silence: a political silence; a silence in the polis, of creatures and landforms that we call “nature.” Some fifty years after its publication, the book is remembered as the work that launched the environmental movement. The spring that was given voice, as it were, by Carson and then by environmental activists now also has constitutional standing in Ecuador, which has rewritten its constitution to include the rights of nature. Notwithstanding many uncertainties over whether the law would survive in practice, in a test case in July 2011 the constitutional court of Ecuador awarded in favor of a river that had been polluted. At least three other governments, courts of law, or city councils have experimented with constitutional acknowledgments of the rights of nature: New Zealand granted legal rights of personhood to the Whanganui River in 2012; Bolivia’s Law of Mother Earth was passed in 2011; and the city of Santa Monica passed its Sustainability Rights ordinance in 2013.2 Constitutions set the terms of the convocation of the polis. The rewriting of constitutions to include the rights of nature in the polis is a vocative moment for springs everywhere. If she were alive, perhaps Rachel Carson might consider titling a new volume Vocal Rivers. (...)