Rachel Carson’s “Fable for Tomorrow,” the opening chapter of Silent Spring, may be the most famous three pages in all of environmental literature. “There was once a town in the heart of America where all life seemed to live in harmony with its surroundings,” she writes. But all was not as it seemed, for a “strange blight” sickened and killed cows, sheep, people, birds, and bees. In her final lines, she reveals the culprit:
No witchcraft, no enemy action had silenced the birth of new life in this stricken world. The people had done it themselves.
As I wrote recently, Silent Spring and its fable worked brilliantly, bringing unprecedented public attention to invisible environmental threats. “A Fable for Tomorrow” made clear that Carson was after not superficial fixes but a serious overhaul of the role of synthetic chemicals in modern life. Carson’s opponents in the chemical industry, recognizing the breadth of her critique, assailed her for using a literary device. Their fear of the fable was well-founded: Silent Spring eventually led to a national ban on the synthetic pesticide DDT and the creation of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, and it shaped the worldwide environmental movement we know today.
“A Fable for Tomorrow” has been imitated countless times, with and without attribution, and no wonder. We environmental writers can only hope our words move readers as much as Rachel Carson’s did. But the power of “A Fable for Tomorrow,” I’ve come to think, is like that of a really good jump scare. It’s marvelously effective, but it only works once.
Scott Slovic, an environmental humanities scholar who recently retired from the University of Idaho, has studied Carson’s fable alongside narratives employed by other well-known environmental writers. Like most of these writers, Carson employs what Slovic calls “the language of warning”; in psychological terms, it’s a fear appeal. She also uses a relatable place or person to represent a large-scale threat — in her case, the composite “town in the heart of America” suffers all the worst effects of pesticide overuse.
These two strategies, combined with Carson’s deep research, literary talent, and excellent timing, made “A Fable for Tomorrow” a classic. But even contemporary imitators couldn’t scare readers out of their chairs as Carson had. In today’s information environment, where we’re saturated with real and exaggerated fear appeals, fables can still persuade and motivate — but they need more rhetorical tools.
Slovic argues that enduring environmental “fables” (both he and I are using the term loosely) still achieve what he calls poignancy, or deep emotional impact, by using the language of warning and employing relatable places and people. But they also use stories of vulnerability and dramatic change, and leaven the language of warning with “the language of hope.” Especially promising, he says, are stories that strengthen “the perception of collective efficacy” by highlighting the achievements of people working together.
In a previous post, I suggested that conservation advocates unlearn their dependence on fear appeals and take heart — and a cue — from the global popularity of Robin Wall Kimmerer’s 2013 book Braiding Sweetgrass. Slovic’s analysis helps explain the book’s appeal: its intertwined essays employ all of these rhetorical tools, gracefully inviting readers to join a collective effort to restore and repair.
Another beloved “fable” that uses many of these tools is Aldo Leopold’s “Thinking Like a Mountain,” published in 1949, which uses the powerful image of a dying wolf to represent both wildness and vulnerability; relates, in fictionalized terms, the author’s dramatic conversion from predator killer to predator champion; and combines the language of warning (“too much safety seems to yield only danger in the long run”) with the language of hope (misquoting Thoreau’s much-misquoted line “in wildness is the preservation of the world.”) For more examples of these tools at work in environmental storytelling, see this 2024 talk Slovic gave at Brown University.
Slovic emphasizes that his analysis is a guide, not a formula, and his latest work demonstrates that no message is guaranteed to succeed. For a study published in the current issue of BioScience, Slovic and his co-authors tested some of the rhetorical strategies he identified by varying the language used in the 2024 State of the Climate Report, part of a long-running series of “warnings to humanity” published by the Alliance of World Scientists.
Slovic and his collaborators found that while the original language of the report, which relies on fear appeals, was ineffective, their variations didn’t do much to inspire readers, either. “Clearly, more work is needed to find the right messages that can break through and overcome the ideological divides deepening the issues reported in the present article,” they conclude. Indeed.
I recently wrote about Republican efforts to disrupt the conservation of U.S. public lands by expanding the application of an obscure law called the Congressional Review Act. The good people of Next Interior have laid out a plan for repealing the CRA, including a handy sample bill. Let’s find this bill some sponsors!
The new group Ground Shift, which like Next Interior is billing itself as something of a think tank for post-Trump public-land stewardship, has a diverse advisory board that includes both Mark Rey (who environmental groups dubbed the “Darth Vader of Forest Policy” during his tenure as a U.S. Department of Agriculture undersecretary during the George W. Bush administration) and Tracy Stone-Manning (who directed the Bureau of Land Management during the Biden administration and is now president of The Wilderness Society). We’ll see if Ground Shift can come up with a coherent vision, but that this crew has found common cause speaks to the radicalism of the Trump administration.
I’m making an educated guess that Ground Shift is the unnamed group Dr. Len Necefer lambastes in “I Said Environmentalism Was Out of Ideas. I Was Wrong. It’s Worse.” Dr. Len argues that the professionalization of the mainstream environmental movement has created advocates who know how to navigate the federal bureaucracy but have lost touch with “the reality of what climate change actually feels like.” Like Dr. Len’s earlier essay “Environmentalism Is Out of Ideas,” which I responded to here, I think this one applies a much-needed critique way too broadly. We absolutely do need large, wealthy environmental organizations to move a lot more funding (and more of the job of persuasion) to groups on the climate and conservation front lines. But if we ever get the chance to repair our damaged national conservation institutions — and may we be so lucky — we’re going to need a bunch of good policy wonks. Groups like Ground Shift and Next Interior are working to convene the latter.
Speaking of institutions, I appreciated this Aeon essay about institutions as “social technologies” that can amplify our cooperative tendencies.
I’m also appreciating The Nature of Things by Carrie Starbuck, director of Nature Recovery at Wiltshire Wildlife Trust in the UK. Conservation wisdom gained from hard work on the ground.
February 7 was the fourth annual Reverse the Red Day, which celebrates species recoveries around the world. Among the noted recoveries this year is that of the Bermuda snail, which is safe from extinction after a decade-long captive breeding and reintroduction effort. Also making progress is one of my favorite species, the adorably ugly purple frog of Kerala, India, which has expanded its range thanks to a multipronged conservation effort.
Finally, in other recovery news, real frogs are returning to the “Frog Wall” in Santa Barbara, California. The Santa Barbara Independent tells the story of this local shrine and its new caretaker.
Comments
Nothing yet. Say the first thing.
Sign in to join the conversation.