by Wayne Spitzer

Created on: June 06, 2009   Last Updated: June 09, 2009

Links on a Chain in Rachel Carson's Silent Spring

Most of us have probably heard the urban legend about alligators in the sewer systems of major U.S. cities, usually Chicago or New York. The story generally goes like this: A baby alligator gets flushed down the toilet but somehow manages to survive the experience, whereupon it grows into adulthood and mates-presumably with another flushee-thus propagating an entire colony of subterranean man-eaters (sometimes the gators are replaced with aborted human fetuses, a variant used to surreal and arguably ridiculous effect in Harlan Ellison's short story, "Croatoan").

The legend of the flushed alligator reached its pop culture zenith in 1980, when John Sayles penned "Alligator," a self-deprecating exploitation movie, in which such a creature survives the sewers by feeding upon chemically-tainted dog carcasses (discarded into the system by a careless commercial laboratory). Mutated by its staple diet, the alligator grows to immense proportions and, breaking to the surface in a Chicago ghetto, begins eating its way up the socio-economic food chain, eating its way uptown, if you will, until at last crashing a party at the mansion of the mayor himself, who is promptly eaten along with his limo.

It is this technique of starting small before advancing up the food chain, that lies at the core of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring; if it seems over-simplistic and cliched, that's because it is, now-40 years of "eco-horror" books and movies (like Sayles' "Alligator") have made it so. Like Sputnik and the atom bomb, Carson's linear, inexorably advancing argument became a catalyst for the sublimated fears of a generation, and a call to action.

A Fable for Tomorrow

The differences between the series of articles which ran in the New Yorker from June 16 through June 30, 1962, and the subsequent book, are both considerable and somehow subtle. Both pieces begin precisely the same way; that is, Carson introduces us to a town, rather, the Town-for it "does not actually exist"-but which serves as a idealized example of the American heartland, the kind of place Ray Bradbury might write about, a place "where all life seemed to be in harmony with its surroundings." Slowly, however, Carson spreads a Shadow, writing to great dramatic effect that, "a strange blight crept over the area and everything began to change. Some evil spell had settled on the community; mysterious maladies swept the flocks of chickens, and the cattle and sheep sickened

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