Remain Calm During a Period of Urgency

Photo credit: Vitalii Khodzinskyi

I like decisiveness. I like things to happen. I'm a doer. I see trends and  take action. These are personality traits that have served me well over time even if things haven't gone my way. I have confidence in decisions when the research points in a particular direction. It's not hard to see which way the wind blows.

Maybe that's how Rachel Carson felt when she waited for the right time to publish her seminal work Silent Spring. She spent years gathering data before writing the book.

Unfortunately, she didn't live very long to see the seismic shift in public attitudes she inspired. The movement to ban DDT. The public awareness that led to the 1970s environmental movement. Because she died in 1964, two years after Silent Spring was published.

My journey to write a novel based on Rachel's struggle to finish Silent Spring, began at the Breadloaf Environmental Conference in Middelbury. I workshopped the first few chapters with a special group of people who provided encouragement and offered suggestions. A year later, I stayed at Rachel's family cottage to complete my manuscript. And since then,  I've had this sense of urgency to get it out into the world. 

I've been pitching to agents and a few have requested to read the manuscript. I've entered it into contests and it has placed as a finalist. I've got a novel that, while not perfect, is waiting for the right editor.

One of the reasons I wrote this novel is because I found many of the Gen Z students in my ecology class didn't know who she was. Then the 3 Body Problem tv series comes out and the main character is reading Silent Spring. The book rockets to #1 on Amazon. I know the time is right for this novel to get out into the world.

When I was in graduate school I worked on a research project for my faculty mentor. Her thesis was that with the lumber and mining industries folding in the western states there would be a lack of infrastructure and services for the populations near federal lands. This she presumed would be a disaster as the populations aged. What I found while digging through Forest Service demographic data was the opposite. Demographers predicted that the Baby Boomers with wealth would retire in these communities (think Bozeman, Montana) and there would be an economic boom. I brought this information with all of my sources documented to my faculty advisor and she gave me a deadpan look. Like this couldn't be possible. It didn't agree with her thesis. I knew I was right, and in the end, the data didn't lie.

When an intern with Save the River on the St. Lawrence, the board wanted me to set up a campaign to stop toxic waste. However, my research with state agencies informed me a more immediate problem was people's raw sewage ending up in the river because of faulty septic systems (or no systems). I developed an action plan that had no backing from the board. It wasn't until a decade later I learned they used my plan and it was a huge success.

Rachel must have felt similarly - the data don't lie - she knew she was right, something had to be done about the indiscriminate use of chemicals in nature. She faced her detractors in the chemical industry as she struggled to finish Silent Spring, all while fighting cancer.

And in my own quest to publish a novel based about her, I fear the waiting. I think about Anita Shreve, who probably had more to write, and then died of cancer, of Hilary Mantel. I recently heard that Madeline Miller, author of Circe and Song of Achilles, has long covid and it has derailed her plans to write a sequel. A friend told me a story about a guy who spent two years on a documentary and non-fiction book and had to stop because of a freak accident. 

Life is fleeting and anything can happen.

"Time itself is like the sea, containing all that came before us, sooner or later sweeping us away on its flood and washing over and obliterating the traces of our presence, as the sea this morning erased the foot-prints of the bird." Rachel Carson Field Notes Nags Head October 9, 1950 Source: Rachel Carson: Witness for Nature by Linda Lear. 

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