The chemical companies tried to cast doubt on the scientific conclusions Rachel had drawn; John F. Kennedy’s administration went to work investigating the problem, and the president himself acknowledged the role that Silent Spring played in focusing the government’s attention on the dangers of pesticides.
Eight months after Silent Spring, the president’s Science Advisory Committee issued a report that backed most of Rachel’s claims. She had testified before that committee as well as in the Senate, appeared on television programs, and spoken to dozens of reporters, despite her own failing health. While Silent Spring was galvanizing a nation to action, Rachel Carson was dying of breast cancer. After she died in 1964, her ashes were scattered at sea, near her home in Maine.
It’s hard not to wish that Rachel Carson had lived longer than her fifty-six years, not only to see the results of her hard work—DDT was banned for agricultural uses nationwide in 1972, two years after the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency—but to turn her incisive pen and generous heart to today’s environmental crises.
“Now in our own lifetime we are witnessing a startling alteration of climate,” Rachel wrote in her second book, The Sea Around Us, in 1951. It is up to us today to save the planet and ourselves from the destruction of climate change—because as Rachel knew well, and as all her books and writing make clear, there is no “planet B.”
Jane Jacobs and Peggy Shepard
JANE JACOBS
PEGGY SHEPARD
Chelsea
As a girl from Scranton, Pennsylvania, Jane Jacobs’s first glimpse of New York City came on a school trip in 1928. As her class emerged from the Holland Tunnel into Lower Manhattan, she recalled being “flabbergasted by the number of people in the streets… the city was just jumping.” That amazement and curiosity would shape her work on urban planning, which would define much of her life.
After high school and a stint working an unpaid job at the local paper in Scranton, Jane left for New York, this time for more than a field trip. In her new hometown, she rode the subway, getting off at different stops to apply for jobs and explore neighborhoods. In Greenwich Village, she found both a secretarial job and a community.
During World War II, Jane worked for the Office of War Information. Following the war she started writing for Amerika, a pro-America Russian-language magazine. She was hounded by McCarthyism and investigated by the FBI because of her beliefs. In response, she wrote: “I do not agree with the extremists of either the left or the right, but I think they should be allowed to speak and to publish, both because they themselves have, and ought to have, rights, and once their rights are gone, the rights of the rest of us are hardly safe.”
After leaving Amerika, Jane went to work for another, albeit quite different, magazine, Architectural Forum. She would later recount how, upon learning she was intended to be the publication’s new expert on schools and hospitals, she became immediately suspicious of experts given how little she knew about both. Still, she was determined to learn all she could—first about architecture, then about urban planning and design. She began to question what made a city healthy—or not—and spent years researching what would become her seminal 1961 book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Putting “death” before “life” in the title was clearly purposeful. Many saw it as an attack on the status quo in city planning—probably because, in the book’s introduction, she declared it “an attack on current city planning and rebuilding.”
In her book, Jane criticized urban planning as “pseudoscience,” with no real basis in facts, and she outlined the real destruction such planners were wreaking on communities where they themselves rarely lived. She popularized and may even have coined the terms “social capital,” to articulate what provides cohesion for communities and other social groups, and “mixed primary uses,” to explain why neighborhoods where people lived and worked were healthier than those where people do only one or the other. She gave us the beautiful phrase “eyes on the street,” to talk about how in mixed primary use neighborhoods there were always people around—off early to work, walking kids to school, going about their day, going out at night, closing the bar, heading home after the late shift. And she wrote about how those neighborhoods, like her own in Greenwich Village, that engaged in a “sidewalk ballet” of consistent movement were more vibrant and protective. Those are the kinds of neighborhoods for living and working she wanted for everyone in urban environments.
Students in urban planning, architecture, economics, public health, history, and more study Jane’s work today; I certainly did while pursuing my master’s in public health at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health. Her reputation now is a contrast to the reaction she received from the male professional class in the 1950s and ’60s. When her first articles came out criticizing contemporary urban renewal practices, she was called a “crazy dame.” After she published her first book, the criticism was even fiercer and more sexist. Her lack of credentials was derided (she never graduated from college), and she was dismissed as “just a mother.” She must have had moments of discouragement. But chauvinism couldn’t stop the power of Jane’s ideas, her voice, or her example.
Jane was not only a hugely important thinker and writer; she was also a powerful activist. In the 1950s and ’60s, she spoke out against the efforts to develop East Harlem without including the East Harlem community; organized to stop slum clearance in her beloved Greenwich Village and a plan to run Fifth Avenue through Washington Square Park; helped stop the proposed Lower Manhattan Expressway, which would have cut through neighborhoods; and trained countless citizens, particularly women, to be powerful advocates for the city they wanted. In 1968, while protesting the latest Lower Manhattan Expressway plans, she was arrested, spent a night in jail, and was later convicted of disorderly conduct.
Jane commuted to her court appointments from Toronto, where she had moved in 1968 partly in protest of the Vietnam War. There she again helped stop proposed expressways that would have cut up and disjointed neighborhoods, and again fought for urban planning that included, rather than excluded, community voices. She passed away in 2006, at eighty-nine, her life defined by her ceaseless work for the cities she thought everyone, whether in New York, Toronto, or anywhere else, deserved.
Like Jane, Peggy Shepard refused to be deterred by powerful corporations or leaders who would have preferred she sit down and shut up. After she was elected the Democratic Assembly district leader for West Harlem, she faced a serious question from her constituents—what could she do about a new sewage-treatment facility that had opened on the Hudson River and was emitting noxious fumes that families were convinced were making them sick? It also smelled like rotten eggs. Peggy drew on her skills as a former journalist and speechwriter for the New York State Division of Housing and Community Renewal and started investigating what was happening in her neighborhood. She learned that the new North River Sewage Treatment Plant had first been planned for a different part of Manhattan, well south of Harlem, and questioned why it had been moved. Was it because her neighborhood had among the lowest incomes in New York City? Because it was majority black? Because the city didn’t think her neighborhood would notice that people were getting sick? All of the above?
Peggy kept asking these tough, important questions about racism, class, equity, and public health. She discovered that the City Planning Commission had never asked her community what it thought about a proposed waste treatment facility. Under pressure from Peggy and other local political and civic leaders, including filing a lawsuit, the city upgraded the facility to remove harmful fumes from the air and much, though not all, of the bad smell. And New York State’s long-delayed promise to build a park on top of the plant finally began to take shape. After being approved in 1970, it finally opened in 1993.
The fight for city accountability and action on the North River Sewage Treatment Plant led Peggy to cofound WE ACT for Environmental Justice, to fight environmental racism in West Harlem and f
or meaningful participation by communities in the policies and plans that impact their neighborhoods and lives. Its record shows it has done just that, repeatedly, from the local to the national levels.
WE ACT’s efforts led to the creation of West Harlem Piers Park, after the city had neglected to include Harlem in its new parks planning effort. The group pushed for new bus emission standards that required New York City buses to move from diesel to hybrid, leading to a 95 percent drop in tailpipe emissions. They worked to pass legislation to get lead out of New York City public housing and schools, and now are working to have those standards enforced. At the national level, they’re working on setting robust environmental standards and ensuring that urban low-income communities are not forgotten, and are included in national legislation, like the annual farm bill.
Peggy has worked with the National Institutes of Health, served as the chair of the Environmental Protection Agency’s National Environmental Justice Advisory Council, and cochaired its Research and Science Workgroup, a powerful statement about how vital it is to have community leaders be part of designing research standards and selecting research programs. WE ACT works with researchers at the local level in New York and also trains and supports local activists and advocates, continually building a multidisciplinary movement to fight environmental racism. It makes perfect sense that Peggy Shepard received the 2008 Jane Jacobs Lifetime Achievement Award, among countless other accolades. Both women understood that fighting for the change they knew was necessary was more likely to draw criticism than acclaim, but they never let that stop them from doing what needed to be done. They continue to inspire the next generation of environmental activists, including Majora Carter and Adrianna Quintero, who work for environmental justice to protect the health of black and Latino communities, including in New York City. The work they and other women are doing to build greener, more sustainable futures and fight the rollback of regulations that have safeguarded and improved our air, water, and land is critical. I like to imagine Jane agitating, advocating, and working alongside Peggy and others, and cheering them on.
Jane Goodall and “The Trimates”
Chelsea
As a little girl in England in the 1930s, Jane Goodall loved animals. When she was just a year old, her father gave her a stuffed chimpanzee named Jubilee in honor of the baby chimp born at the London Zoo. The stuffed toy was nearly the same size as Jane. Friends cautioned her parents that a toy like that would give her nightmares, but Jane loved it. When she was five years old, she was so desperate to know how an egg came out of a hen that she hid inside the henhouse for several hours, waiting. She was oblivious to the fact that her family had been frantically searching for her, and had reported her missing to the police.
Even as a child, Jane dreamed of traveling to Africa to live and work alongside the animals she had only seen in zoos and read about in books. In 1957, on a trip to visit a family friend in Kenya, Jane sought out Dr. Louis Leakey, a paleoanthropologist and archaeologist, who was working to prove his hypothesis that humans first emerged in Africa, not Europe or Asia, as was then the widely accepted view by Western scientists. For his research team, Leakey recruited young scientists and aspiring scientists to study the evolutionary connection between Homo sapiens and primates. Leakey believed that directly observing primates in their native habitats, rather than in captivity, would help prove that an evolutionary link existed between primates and humans.
Leakey first hired Jane as a secretary to record his findings. He quickly recognized her talent and encouraged her to study primatology so she could do her own fieldwork. While she was studying and working for Leakey, her mentor raised the necessary funds to help launch Jane’s work studying chimpanzees. (Chimpanzees, gorillas, and orangutans, are “great apes,” which have larger brains than monkeys, larger bodies, and, as Jane judiciously continues to point out, no tail.) In 1960, Jane embarked on her pathbreaking work at Gombe Stream National Park, in Tanzania. Establishing her own research camp was already a remarkable achievement for someone with no undergraduate or advanced degree in her field of study. She would more than prove Leakey’s faith in her, later pursuing a PhD in ethology (the study of animal behavior) from Cambridge University based on her research. She has the distinction of being one of that school’s few doctoral graduates who didn’t first earn an undergraduate degree.
When Jane began observing chimpanzees, we understood little about chimpanzees’ behavior or our common ancestry. Her decision to live and work among them, as well as her commitment to observing and imitating them, was not then common research practice. She also insisted on naming the chimpanzees she watched for years, rather than giving them simple letter or numerical designations. This was controversial; researchers at the time were expected to remain removed from their animal subjects and certainly not to see them as humanlike. Yet the importance of Jane’s work is indisputable. Early on, she made several discoveries: that chimpanzees have a highly complex social system governing their interactions; that they are omnivorous, not vegetarian; and that they make and use tools. Jane watched as chimpanzees turned a twig into a spoon to help eat termites—contradicting the idea that the making and use of tools were uniquely human characteristics. Today scientists have identified a number of tools used by chimpanzees. In her early work, Jane further showed that chimpanzees communicate using touches, gestures, and more than a hundred different unique sounds, but they do not have their own language. It is humans’ ability to talk to one another that Jane is convinced drove our greater intellectual development.
While Jane watched chimpanzees commit acts of horrific violence toward one another, she observed great love in chimpanzees, too. She found common traits among good chimpanzee mothers, including being supportive, affectionate, playful, protective but not overly so, and able to use discipline. Jane saw the generational effects of this loving parenting when she noticed that females who had good chimpanzee mothers were more likely themselves to raise healthy, secure, happy offpsring. All of this influenced how Jane parented her own son, Hugo.
At a fundamental level, Jane changed what we understand not only about chimpanzees but also about ourselves. Scientists now believe, in part because of Jane’s work, that humans and chimpanzees share a common ancestor. We know we share 98 percent of our DNA. It’s not surprising, then, that Stephen Jay Gould, the acclaimed paleontologist and author, once called Jane’s discovery of chimpanzees as tool-makers “one of the great achievements of 20th-century scholarship.” The glowing praise from experts in the field may have come as a surprise to Jane, who has repeatedly said while she wanted to study chimpanzees, she never cared about being a scientist.
In the early 1960s, Jane fell in love with Hugo van Lawick, a photographer who had been sent by National Geographic to document her work. (“Jane disliked being photographed, but tolerated it for the sake of her research,” wrote Lori Cuthbert in the same publication decades later. “She may have also tolerated it because Hugo was the one behind the camera; they were married a few years later.”) They had a son together, and though they eventually divorced, they stayed close.
In the 1980s, Jane started to spend more time advocating for broader conservation efforts across Africa and around the world, sometimes working with her second husband, Derek Bryceson, the then director of Tanzania’s national parks. She highlighted the increase in mining, logging, slash-and-burn agriculture, illegal hunting, poaching, and the connection of all those activities to poverty, corruption, and underinvestment in local communities. For decades, Jane has advocated for and worked to put communities affected by environmental degradation at the center of shaping the solutions to this crisis. She has also shifted her writing away from purely reporting on her chimpanzee observations to trying to save chimpanzees, their environments, and the livelihoods of the people who live near them. Her concerns are well placed. In 1900, there were about a million chimpanzees in the wild. Today there are between 170,000 and 300,000. If current trends of deforestation, hunting, and
disease continue, chimpanzees in the wild could disappear within two generations. Such a stark forecast, along with growing environmental devastation in the regions where she works, helps explain why, even well into her eighties, Jane shows no sign of slowing down in her work.
Following in Jane’s footsteps, primatologists Dian Fossey and Biruté Galdikas also found their way to Dr. Leakey, who eventually nicknamed the three young women scientists the “Trimates.” With Leakey’s support, in the mid-1960s, Dian moved from Kentucky to the Virunga Mountains to set up her first research station, based in the present-day Democratic Republic of the Congo, then Zaire. Unlike Jane, she focused on gorillas—a great ape that is typically larger and less social than the chimpanzee. To prove she wasn’t a threat to the gorillas she was studying, Dian began by observing gorillas from a distance and imitating their movements and sounds. She meticulously recorded the gorillas’ individual and communal behaviors. Less than a year after she began her work, during a period of instability in the region where Dian was working, the Zairian military forced her to leave her research station. Determined to continue her work, Dian moved her work to the Rwandan side of the Virungas, set up the Karisoke Research Center, ingratiated herself with new groups of gorillas, and again began carefully recording what she observed. From her early days at Karisoke, Dian practiced what she called “active conservation,” which meant fighting poachers as well as cattle herders she believed were infringing on gorilla territory. She also opposed wildlife tourism. Her controversial tactics and positions inspired both greater support for anti-poaching efforts and hostility for what many local community members around Karisoke believed was infringing on hunting and grazing practices. She received intense criticism for discouraging communities from even engaging in responsible wildlife tourism. In 1985, she was found murdered in her home. The crime has never been solved. Dian’s work continues through the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund in the Virunga Mountains of both Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The fund supports research and gorilla protection at Karisoke, and recent data shows that after years of decline, the Virunga mountain gorilla population is growing.
The Book of Gutsy Women Page 11
