TWO
WOMEN OF THE SOILA tribute to Lady Eve Balfour and Rachel Carson: inspirations to the organic movement.
Lady Eve Balfour
photo: The Soil Association
THE RECENT RISE of organic farming in the United Kingdom has been astounding. What was a small trickle of interest from many long-standing committed individuals has broken through many barriers to flood into the mainstream. The reasons are many. A new market for organic food is created out of an awareness of health and the environment. Also there is a growing distrust of other food sources, contributed to by the bse crisis and Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs). What is very interesting about this trend is that it is bringing more women into farming: almost half of organic farmers are women, compared with only five per cent of those farming “chemically”.
Women have always played a part in agriculture; indeed, in most small-scale agriculture in the Third World, women are responsible for farming. But at some point in the social history of the Western world, perhaps during the industrial revolution, the role of the farmer increasingly became the domain of men whilst women moved into a supportive role. Was it as the vocabulary of agriculture became warped by descriptions of chemicals and new technology, and farming became an agro-industry, removing its roots from the land, that women became increasingly isolated from farming? And was this connected with the intellectual movement that twisted Darwin’s theories into the familiar line of “man’s fight to dominate nature” (the masculine battling against the feminine)?
Whatever the roots of the schism, how ironic that the arrival of seemingly endless mechanical “aids” has actually led to women being less involved in agriculture. The use of tractors and vast combine-harvesters means that one person can do the job that historically was the work of many. So why is it that it usually is one man doing the job, and not one woman? The theories are many, but the fact is clear — that many women feel uncomfortable, or unwelcome, in the world of agro-industry. On the other hand, organic farming is encouraging women to enter the world of food production.
To celebrate this refeminization of agriculture, this article looks back at two of the most influential women in the development of organic farming — Lady Eve Balfour and Rachel Carson. We celebrate their achievements and their ability to communicate and demystify science in order to bring it back to earth and into the hands of ordinary people. Equally important was their moral leadership and courage — two qualities that were especially necessary, at a time when the work of these two women brought them into direct conflict with the prevailing ideas of the mainstream.
LADY EVE knew from a very early age that she wanted to put her energies into farming. In 1915 it was certainly not the usual direction that young women chose. The fact that she was one of the first women to study agriculture at Reading University shows just how much farming was a man’s world. But for a woman described by various commentators as “strong, vigorous, independent, energetic, ground-breaking and possessing a challenging wisdom”, entering the world of agriculture was just a challenge and not a barrier. Later on in her farming career she came in contact with the ideas of Sir Robert McCarrison and Sir Albert Howard in the field of medicine and agriculture respectively.
Both men were convinced of the relationship between food and health. With her focus on this theme, Lady Eve set about assimilating research material on the matter and in 1943 published her findings in a book called The Living Soil. “My subject is food, which concerns everyone; it is health, which concerns everyone; it is the soil, which concerns everyone — though they may not realize it,” she said, “and [this book] is the history of certain researches linking these three vital subjects.”
Such a subject matter was hardly expected to attract mainstream readership, but the book was a bestseller and within five years was in its eighth edition. Lady Eve brought together many diverse strands of research that pointed to the importance of a healthy soil. By using a multidisciplinary, holistic approach she managed to illuminate the subject for many people and created a new approach to food, agriculture and health: namely the “organic movement”. The book received enormous response, stimulating a large meeting of like-minded people in the summer of 1945. From this meeting The Soil Association was founded. Encouraged by these events, Eve Balfour carried on her work by undertaking the enormous task of conducting the first comparative study of organic and conventional farming on her own farm (the Haughley experiment). Later, Lady Eve, looking back at the development of The Soil Association, poignantly wrote, “the Association . . . rapidly came to stand amongst the membership for something much deeper and more fundamental than the words suggest — nothing less than an attitude to Life itself.”
Rachel Carson
photo: Penguin Books
TWENTY YEARS LATER, on the other side of the Atlantic, Rachel Carson’s book Silent Spring was an influential exposé of the drawbacks of intensive chemical farming. The title of the book eerily hints at the eye-opening tale inside: a shocking treatise on agrochemicals and their effect on people and the environment. Rachel Carson explained the origins of these chemicals (some of them derived from chemical warfare), and pulled together many examples of misuse, describing their known impact on many of the people who were using them. The list of deadly substances liberally sprinkled, spread and sprayed on the land was detailed — amongst others, ddt, chlordane, dieldrin, parathion and arsenic; followed by horrifying examples of their effects: from small children being fatally poisoned from accidental spray drift of an insecticide; a farmer’s wife being killed by water with high arsenic content; to numerous incidents of farm labourers suffering from occupational exposure to various agrochemicals. Rachel Carson also affirmed the growing suspicion that many of these chemicals had entered the complex cycle of nature and were being concentrated up the food chains, to cause widespread poisoning of many species, the most well-known example being ddt and its effect on the bird population.
The reaction to Silent Spring reached all quarters and touched everyone profoundly. Aldous Huxley echoed many others when he commented after reading the book, “We are losing half the subject-matter of English poetry.” Silent Spring, though written thirty-five years ago, is still one of the most powerful cases against the over-use of chemicals in farming, and, as a result, it reinforces the need for different approaches to farming, such as organic methods. The author did not condemn chemical farming outright, but called for a more sensible approach — a change in emphasis in the use of chemical pesticides. Her conviction was that: “no civilization can wage relentless war on life without destroying itself, and without losing the right to be called civilized.”
Rachel Carson died of cancer in 1964, two years after Silent Spring was published. Realizing the opposition she would face in publishing such material, and the cannon-fodder that her illness would provide to the cynics, she hid it from all but a close few. The book was finished only through her extreme determination, whilst suffering greatly — at one point close to its finalization she was nearly sightless due to a side effect of her disease and its medication. “Unquestionably, what this book has to say will come as news to 99 out of 100 people,” she foretold. And it was. The book was instantly top of the New York Times best-seller list.
RACHEL CARSON and Lady Eve Balfour have many parallels. Both were women who were not within the ivory tower of the scientific community, but who had access to and ties with it. Specifically, both women were not officially, or academically, “qualified” to write these powerful books. In fact, this was a great freedom as it allowed the authors to cast their eyes across many academic fields to find their evidence, and support their innate convictions. The secret was in lifting research from the depths of the journals of scientific fields, each with its complex vocabulary and slant, straightening out the language and presenting it freshly, in a way that the majority of people could understand. Rachel Carson summed it up thus: “My relation to technical scientific writing has been that of one who understands the language, but does not use it.” The impact of both books was remarkable, and their success a tribute to the gigantic task of assimilating a great deal of diverse research without either degrading the quality or sensationalizing the message. Moreover, the two books with potentially uninspiring subjects — the soil and pesticides — make compelling reading.
Rachel Carson and Lady Eve Balfour became thorns in the side of the pro-chemical lobby, who often went to a lot of trouble to discredit the authors. How was The Living Soil perceived by mainstream scientists? This is best summed up by one of the few supporters of Lady Eve at the time, an academic soil scientist called Dr. Stewart: “[Lady Eve’s research] was ignored because the agricultural scientists of the time were naively self-confident of their ability to dominate Nature. They had no interest in ecological constraints that might limit production. Lady Eve herself was discounted as a mystic who really believed in learning from Nature and working along with it.”
Being discounted as a mystic was probably the easier pill to swallow. For Rachel Carson, who was well aware that she was whistle-blowing, the attacks were more vicious. Already aware of the controversy she was about to stir up, and that the might of the agro-chemical industry would be pitted against her, she was determined to go ahead. She wrote the following to a close friend, “You do know, I think, how deeply I believe in the importance of what I am doing. Knowing what I do, there would be no future peace for me if I kept silent . . . It is, in the deepest sense, a privilege, as well as a duty, to have the opportunity to speak out — to many thousands of people — on something so important.”
In fact, she was almost silenced when one company sought an injunction to prevent the sale of her book. Thankfully it failed, but the attacks continued. Many agrochemical companies launched a serious offensive trying to rubbish her. One of the most vocal critics was a name now familiar to most of us — Monsanto. And among the attacks were the predictable personal ones. Rachel Carson was denigrated as an “emotional female alarmist”. A slap in the face, when in fact her sex was irrelevant to her scientific research and the facts she discovered. The insult could be turned on its head by congratulating the author for expressing her female intuition and emotion, and for being far-seeing enough to be alarmed at the situation.
Silent Spring has just been reprinted again, which is encouraging. But on the other hand it is a sad reflection that the subject is still valid and as much in demand today as four decades ago. Rachel Carson lamented that “contemporary society seldom evaluates the risk of a new technology before it is embedded in a vast economic and political commitment, becoming virtually impossible to alter.”
Unfortunately, that quote could be from a debate in yesterday’s newspapers on GMOs. And the following quote from Silent Spring still rings true: “This is an era of specialists, each of whom sees his own problem and is unaware of, or intolerant of, the larger frame into which it fits. It is also an era dominated by industry, in which the right to make a dollar at whatever cost is seldom challenged. When the public protests . . . it is fed little tranquillizing pills of half truth.”
The good news is that The Soil Association, which Lady Eve Balfour founded fifty years ago, is now booming. The Association’s advocacy of the organic movement throughout the past fifty years has enabled its present growth and allowed it to prove itself a valid alternative to intensive chemical agriculture. Furthermore, the inclusion of more women in what was previously a male-dominated world can only be a cause for celebration. I once heard a farmer tease: “Nothing sends me to sleep more than hearing women talking about organic farming.” I would have liked to respond, but only now have the apt retort I was searching for — “Actually women aren’t talking about it. They’re doing it.” •
Rachel Carson: The Life of the Author of Silent Spring by Linda Lear (Penguin).
The Soil Association, Bristol House, 40-56 Victoria Street, Bristol BS1 6BY. Tel: 0117 914 2400.
Sophie Poklewski Koziell is co-author of Gathering Force. DIY Culture Radical Action for those Tired of Waiting (Big Issue, London).
