Reading Nature

           As I am working on my final project theorizing on reading and nature, I was intrigued by Carson’s textual characterization of the environment in Silent Spring.  My project orbits around Thoreau’s approach to reading; he advocates a model of reading that restores immediacy to experiencing nature.  Nature is not a book to thumb through, but Thoreau asserts we can access nature by being deliberate readers.  The act of reading offers us the training we need to deconstruct the screen between our civilized world and nature.  As Thoreau says, “No method or discipline can supersede the necessity of being forever on the alert.  What is a course of history, or philosophy, or poetry, no matter how well selected, or the best society, or the most admirable routine of life, compared with the discipline of looking always at what is to be seen?  Will you be a reader, a student merely, or a seer?”  (74-5).  Reading is the means to connecting to nature.  It should not be an endpoint.

Carson makes similar claims about reading as an action that brings us closer to our surroundings, but in Silent Spring, nature is what we can, and must, read.  She employs her “us vs. them” technique to identify “us” as the readers, the audience of what “they” write.  The authors (scientists, politicians, CEOs, etc.) write through their actions, recording “new chapters” onto each countryside they help alter (85).  Each natural setting is thus imbued with significance, but just like an unopened book is an inconsequential object, so, too, is nature something that requires readers in order to create a meaning-making ecology.  As Caron articulates, “the natural landscape is eloquent of the interplay of forces that have created it. It is spread before us like the pages of an open book in which we can read why the land is what it is, and why we should preserve its integrity.  But the pages lie unread” (64).  Silent Spring urges us never to stop humbly reading what nature has to say.  Carson wrote her book at a time when it seemed most people had finished reading nature, preferring the Cliff Notes versions to the uncensored wild editions of the past.  Silent Spring is her attempt to perform Thoreau’s definition of reading as a tool to get us nearer to nature.

Carson, Rachel.  Silent Spring.  1962.  Introd. Linda Lear.  New York, NY: Houghton Mifflin, 2002.

Thoreau, Henry David.  Walden.  1854.  Ed. Owen Thomas.  New York, NY: Norton, 1966.