Waldorf News

Earth Day and Anthroposophy

by John Beck

Some recent history of the struggle to balance a materialist science of nature with the mature fruits of the human mind and spirit

I wish to speak a word for Nature, for absolute freedom and wildness, as contrasted with a freedom and culture merely civil,–to regard man as an inhabitant, or a part and parcel of Nature, rather than a member of society. I wish to make an extreme statement, if so I may make an emphatic one, for there are enough champions of civilization: the minister and the school-committee, and every one of you will take care of that. —”Walking” (1862), from Excursions, by Henry David Thoreau

Earth Day was born on April 22, 1970. It is often called the beginning of the modern environmental movement, and the twenty million people who participated in this day of “teach-ins” inaugurated by Wisconsin US Senator Gaylord Nelson certainly constituted a movement. So the 40th Earth Day was celebrated with much hoopla in 2010.

As with everything else, however, there are starting points behind the starting point.

• 2012 brought the 50th anniversary of the book Silent Spring, by the American biologist, writer, and ecologist Rachel Carson. Her carefully documented critique of the wholesale use of pesticides created the specific consciousness shift out of which the Earth Day movement was born.
• Rachel Carson’s work was crucially supported by a lawsuit brought a few years earlier by biodynamic farmers Marjorie Spock and Polly Richards. They had objected to heavy DDT spraying on Long Island, New York, and while they lost their suit and appeal, they developed much hard evidence and shifted the grounds for government-sponsored intrusions into the environment.
• Biodynamic agriculture was born in 1924, so its 90th anniversary comes next year. It was the last great initiative launched by Rudolf Steiner before his death in 1925, and he had been implored to go to agricultural East Prussia to advise farmers who were finding that artificial fertilizers and other “modern” farming techniques were exhausting the soil. “Modern” farming in Germany had been given a strong push by the blockade of Germany in the Great War of 1914-18, when scientists urgently sought artificial substitutes for resources no longer available by trade. The BD Association in the USA is now 75 years old.
• Rudolf Steiner had begun to formulate his whole field of activity as “anthroposophy” in 1913, just a century ago, and an Anthroposophical Society was first formed then which received and followed up on his research activities into the inner worlds of consciousness. Steiner’s picture of the human being reminded us that while we might be physically separate from the rest of the world at any given moment, our life activity is totally interwoven into the whole planetary life which further involves the Sun especially, but also the Moon and planets and fixed stars.
• And Rudolf Steiner’s consciousness of nature had been vastly stimulated by his meeting at age 18 on the train to Vienna with one Felix Koguski, a nature mystic and herbalist who retained the last elements of an ancient wisdom about healing plants and the beings invisibly involved in the life of the planet.
• But why had human beings ever lost their feeling for the depth of Nature and our own participation in it? Steiner notes the artificial creation of urea in 1828, the first time an organic substance – something produced by a living organism – was produced artificially from lifeless chemicals. Urea is a powerful source of nitrogen for fertilizers as well as a foundation for polyurethane and the whole world of plastics. With this 1828 accomplishment, the life science of biology began to be annexed to the lifeless science of chemistry.
• And if we would push things back a bit further, we can mention the work of René Descartes in the 1640s when he distinguished material body from immaterial mind and laid the foundation for seeing the whole of Nature as a great machine with neither life nor consciousness. And if Nature is just a great machine, it is ours to control and manage as we please with no understanding required beyond the sphere of mechanics…

Rachel Carson & Marjorie Spock

Which is where Rachel Carson comes in, and Marjorie Spock who became her informant and friend. First, about Marjorie, her obituary says:

The Spock family was prominent in New Haven, as her father was a corporate lawyer there and her older brother, Dr. Benjamin Spock, was later a world-renowned pediatrician… and known for his work against the Vietnam War. At 18, Marjorie went to Dornach, Switzerland, to meet and work with Rudolf Steiner, the founder of Anthroposophy. This had deep significance for her life, especially her study of the dynamics of human movement, through Eurythmy. After her final return to the U.S., she received her BA and MA degrees from Columbia University at the age of 38. During her studies, she began a prominent career as a teacher and the head of the Dalton Middle School and teacher at the Fieldston Lower School, both progressive schools in New York City. She also taught at The Rudolf Steiner School in New York City and The Waldorf School in Garden City, Long Island.

With her deep understanding of nature and as an avid Bio-Dynamic gardener, Marjorie’s work took on an added dimension when, in the area where she and her friend Polly Richards lived, on Long Island, New York, the government began aerial spraying of DDT against the perceived gypsy moth epidemic. She and Polly, who helped finance the legal action, brought a case with 10 other people against the United States government for the continued DDT spraying. Marjorie and Polly were formidable leaders for this commitment to the health of the earth. Organic, Bio-Dynamic food was a life-saving matter for Polly, who was in ill health. For Marjorie, the concern was for her friend’s health, and the constitutional right as a property owner to keep her land, as she wanted it, free of government infringement.

This team was brilliant, committed and erudite. According to Marjorie, the “government ran roughshod over anyone who got in the way of the new technology. They brushed us off like so many flies.” The federal judge, appointed by President Eisenhower, threw out 72 uncontested admissions for the plaintiffs and denied their petitions. From the summer of 1957 to 1960, when the case reached the Supreme Court, Marjorie wrote a report to interested and influential friends of each day’s progress in and out of court, each evening after work.

Rachel Carson heard of this and soon got these daily briefings because she realized that the testimony from the experts that Marjorie had found, would be valuable for her own research. This case, along with a massive bird kill on Cape Cod, was the springboard for the writing of Silent Spring. The trial took only 22 days, and toward the end, Rachel Carson asked for the transcript. They became close collaborators and friends. Though the plaintiffs lost the case, they won the right to bring an injunction in court, so that prior to a destructive environmental event, a full and proper scientific a review had to be made. Marjorie always described it, saying, “We lost the battle but won the war.” This became the germinal legal action for the environmental movement in the United States. There has been continuous interest in this case since that time…

After the case, Marjorie…worked closely with Dr. Ehrenfried Pfeiffer, the renowned soil scientist, and compost and farm adviser for Bio-Dynamic movement… In 1965, Marjorie moved to Maine, where she lived and worked for the next 43 years as an inspiring teacher, eurythmist, author, Bio-Dynamic farmer, translator and mentor to the many people, young and old, who came to see her.

A Grim Struggle

Linda Lear, author of Rachel Carson: Witness for Nature, quotes a letter (p.318) from Spock to Carson during the legal struggle: “I think you know how grim this struggle with the U.S. government and the whole chemical industry is bound to be. We have marshalled some pretty solid scientific men and data, and are feeling confident.” Lear goes on to describe Marjorie Spock as “a woman of enormous courage, integrity, and indefatigable spirit who soon became one of Carson’s inner circle of friends and the central point of her original research network.… Raised in a large, boisterous, and erudite family in New Haven, Connecticut, she was creative and intellectually independent…”

Marjorie Spock described Rachel Carson (p.331) at their first meeting in Maine: “Upon landing we went to meet her at the inn’s parking lot. As we approached it, a slightly built woman came around the bend walking unhurriedly. Seeing us she smiled, but did not change her pace. When we knew Rachel better, we realized how typical it was of her to keep to her own way in everything. Neither at this nor further meetings did she strike us as an exuberant, outgoing nature. But there was no heaviness in her somewhat grave demeanor, no lack of warmth in her reserve, or unease in her incapacity for chit-chat. Rather did she seem to disciplined to concentration, so given to listening and looking and weighing impressions as to be unable to externalize.”

Carson had written successful books and articles: Under the Sea-wind (1941), The Sea Around Us (1951), The Edge of the Sea (1955), and “Help Your Child to Wonder” (1956). Now she turned to the problem of human beings’ unhappy interventions into nature with synthetic poisons. The next book took a while to find its title: “The Control of Nature,” “At War with Nature,” and “Man Against the Earth” reflect her concerns; the final Silent Spring is of course immeasurably more potent. Not only was the science solid but the book would make a qualitative appeal to the American housewives who were then in the spirit of progress applying insecticides to their gardens as their husbands might to the crab-grass.

Carson suffered a series of illnesses including breast cancer while writing the book. Suffering from an inflammation of the iris that left her temporarily almost blind near the end of the writing, she was cheered by a phone call from the great editor William Shawn of the New Yorker, who told her (Lear, p.395) that her manuscript was “a brilliant achievement” and that “you have made it literature, full of beauty and loveliness and depth of feeling.” “Suddenly,” Carson wrote, “I knew from [Shawn’s] reaction that my message would get across.”

Humanity Challenged to Self-Mastery

Just before Silent Spring appeared the US was spared—by the resistance of one regulator, Dr. Frances Kelsey of the FDA—a wave of birth defects caused in Europe and Canada by the mild sleep-aid thalidomide. This brush with disaster woke Americans up to the danger of side effects, the shadow of our vaunted technological fixes. President Kennedy gave Dr. Kelsey a gold medal. And the Kennedy administration soon provided a real champion for Carson’s concerns in Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall.

On the negative side, Carson’s book was held to be damaging the economy, threatening abundant food production; and of course there might be a conspiracy behind it somewhere. The nastiness of the attacks on Carson was set at a very high pitch. Question: “Why a spinster with no children was so concerned about genetics?” Explanation: she was “probably a Communist.”

Beginning with The New Yorker, however, and Houghton Mifflin, and Audubon magazine, and the Book of the Month Club—a tremendous line-up fifty years ago—much of the media stood up for her book and brought the message home. Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas endorsed it as “the most revolutionary book since Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” a comparison made repeatedly to another unexpected book by an American woman which had aroused her country against slavery over a century earlier.

“But many in science, government, and industry…recognized Silent Spring for what it was: a fundamental social critique of a gospel of technological progress. Carson had attacked the integrity of the scientific establishment, its moral leadership, and its direction of society. Holding up before them their irresolute carelessness of the natural world, she dared to make their sins public. The fury with which they attacked her reflected the accuracy of her moral charges. Since her facts were essentially irrefutable, they disparaged Carson as the agent of a message that had to be suppressed.

“Over the course of the controversy, it became clear to her enemies as well as her allies that Carson had forced a public debate over the heretofore academic idea that living things and their environment were interrelated. It was the central theme of everything she had written before, and so it was at the core of Silent Spring as well.” (Lear, p.429)

Carson also got to speak in defense of her book, and her calm manner reinforced her facts. On CBS Reports, April 1963, she said, “I truly believe that we in this generation must come to terms with nature, and I think we’re challenged as mankind has never been challenged before to prove our maturity and our mastery not of nature, but of ourselves.” (On a Farther Shore: The Life and Legacy of Rachel Carson  by William Souder, p379)

After a final series of radiation treatments, Rachel Carson died April 14, 1964 of cancer, aged 56. Marjorie Spock died age 103 in 2008, one of the last people then living who had actually worked with Rudolf Steiner.

John Beck is editor of being human magazine from the Anthroposophical Society in America. This article originally appeared at anthroposophy.org. To view the article at source, click here.