Not long ago, the marine biologist Victor Bonito and I sat on a deck overlooking a palm-studded stretch of turquoise coastline where thousands of dazzling reef fish – pink and emerald parrotfish, blue and yellow unicorn fish, orange-and-white-striped clownfish – had recently washed up on the shore, dead. The ocean along the western edge of this Fijian island, the ‘big island' of Viti Levu, had become too hot for its inhabitants to survive. The fish lay rotting in the sun with nubbly starfish and the occasional gelatinous octopus, their brilliant colours fading, while thousands more floated belly up on the surface of the sea. Villagers waded in, trying to scoop up and save what they could, focusing on fish that serve as food and provide income for their families. Children swam after the bright, dead creatures washing out to sea. ‘It is our treasure,' they lamented, ‘disappearing.' Bonito, wearing an old grey T-shirt and sandy shorts, looked out over the gently ruffled surface of the sea, remembering how the massacre unfolded. He works on coral restoration in these waters, and he told me that soon after the fish die-off, nearly a third of the inshore corals bleached.
All over the world, mass animal die-offs are on the rise, from ‘melting' starfish to Russian seals washing up on the shores of Lake Baikal to more than 200,000 appealingly hump-nosed saiga antelope lying across the Kazakh steppe. And the walruses. Oh, the walruses. We've seen this sort of thing before, and then as now the die-offs were caused by human activity. In Silent Spring, her ecological masterpiece, Rachel Carson wrote of fish and birds mysteriously dropping dead all across America (‘In the summer of 1960 the refuge staff picked up hundreds of dead and dying birds at Tule Lake and Lower Klamath … herons, pelicans, grebes, gulls'), describing the mysterious pattern of mass deaths with the urgency and suspense of true crime. Of ‘one of the most spectacular fish kills of recent years', she writes:
Shortly after daylight on Sunday morning, 15 January, dead fish appeared in the new Town Lake in Austin and in the river for a distance of about five miles below the lake. None had been seen the day before. On Monday there were reports of dead fish 50 miles downstream. By this time it was clear that a wave of some poisonous substance was moving down in the river water … a week later the chemicals were doing their lethal work 200 miles below Austin.
Following the scattered clues wherever they led, Carson painstakingly pieced together an unassailable case against chemical pesticides, then being indiscriminately dumped over field and stream in white clouds, and in smaller but more intimately toxic loads by American housewives cultivating their gardens and moth-proofing their babies blankets.
Reading Silent Spring today, in the hazy reddish glow of climate catastrophe, is both an exhilarating and a melancholy pleasure. The story of Carson's dogged pursuit of truth against all odds – the lack of settled science, her own daily struggle with breast cancer, the personal attacks launched by the chemical industry after the book's publication – is profoundly inspiring at a time when hope in such endeavours seems to be in short supply.
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