Tag Archives: science

“The Call of the Trail,” or How Children’s Lit Shapes Science

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Cover illustration of St. Nicholas magazine, a children’s literary periodical.

“The call of the trail […] was too strong to withstand,” writes a 15-year-old Rachel Carson in one of her earliest publications, “My Favorite Recreation” (1922). Later, Carson would go on to become one of the most important environmental scientists in the world, authoring Silent Spring (1962) and impelling the US government to create the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Carson was always a writer, even from youth, and along with fellow early environmentalists such as Aldo Leopold, she was heavily influenced by the Nature Study Movement and children’s literature.

“My Favorite Recreation” is a prime example of juvenalia, or literary and artistic work produced during youth. Carson was an avid reader of St. Nicholas magazine (an iconic children’s periodical) and this in turn led her to write about the one thing she knew best: the natural world. Children’s stories tells us a lot about the world, including the views we’ll develop later in life.

Children’s literature can also have a profound impact on how we understand science in many ways. First, many stories such as animal fables or educational stories create a “feedback loop” that reflects and shapes discourse about the natural world. When I was young, I was enthralled with Eye Witness Books, a series about all things science and technology. Eye Witness Books such as Sharks or Arms and Armor are obviously based on science, but in writing for a general (often young) audience, these publications also synthesize knowledge. They take a topic and boil it down to its key points, which is itself a way of making knowledge more “real.” We almost take it for granted when scientific explanations are written in children’s books, even though they are still scientific “arguments”–ones based on strong evidence.

Second, children’s stories shape our sense of the natural world in our youth, which in turn impacts us for life. Youngsters who hear animal fables or read about nature are often more sympathetic towards those topics in their adult years. (There’s a wonderful special cluster of empirically driven articles in a 2020 issue of Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment about the impact of literature on environmental awareness and empathy.) Reading is persuasive, especially when you’re young.

Below are two examples to consider when talking about science and children’s lit. The first takes a closer look at Carson’s writing, while the second examines a more controversial children’s book by Elizabeth Olds. Carson’s juvenalia is a great artifact for considering her environmental philosophy, which I’ll show can be traced to both nascent environmental education and St. Nicholas magazine. Olds’s story about petro-culture shows a potentially darker side; it relates the history of oil production in the US but subtly promotes fossil fuel consumption.

Carson’s Early Work

Rachel Carson Portrait. Photo Credit to Pitt Botanic Garden.

Most people know Rachel Carson for her exposé journalism in Silent Spring, which documented the harmful use of DDT pesticides. The piece was particularly powerful given the impact of DDT on the egg shells of American bald eagles (which made them particularly vulnerable), yet the study also raises alarms about threats to human reproduction and health. Carson is a scientist, but she’s also a well-versed writer who knew that the eagle could serve as a metaphor for American health and well-being. As a result of her work, Carson launched the modern conservation movement.

It’s joyful to read “My Favorite Recreation” knowing about the future that’s in store for a young Carson, who is eagerly writing a piece to a children’s literary magazine she enjoys. In her piece, she writes about discovering a bobwhite nest, orioles, and the “lichen covered home of the humming bird” (13). It’s a short piece, but Carson uses terms and phrases like “thrilled” and “exultation,” “discovery” and “gloriously happy.” These are the words of an explorer exposed to sublimity–especially in the form of birdsong–and of scientific observation. She notes the size and color of eggs, she sounds out bird calls, and she teaches us how to discover her favorite bird, the wood thrush. Carson was an “Honor Member” of the St. Nicholas League by the time this story appeared and had even earned $10 for a previous story.

Analyzing the story “My Favorite Recreation” tells us a few things. First, the story uses the scientific practices of observation and description. Carson is well-equipped with a notebook and camera, and, even at 15 years old, she writes her story to portray a scientific subject looking at nature-as-object. I’d argue this is important since even scientific discourse is ideological, with its own conventions and assumptions. This isn’t to suggest that science isn’t fact-driven, but rather to recognize that here, a young Carson is subtly promoting a scientific mindset.

Now, interestingly, Carson puts this in narrative form and also alludes to a sense of sublimity or wonder, especially resulting from scientific practice. Carson does this in Silent Spring as well, which might shock some readers to learn that it opens with “A Fable for Tomorrow.” This section is actually a “Jeremiad,” a prophetic warning about what will happen if we don’t stop environmental degradation. And, it’s incredibly literary for a scientist:

THERE WAS ONCE a town in the heart of America where all life seemed to live in harmony with its surroundings […] A grim specter has crept upon us almost unnoticed, and this imagined tragedy may easily become a stark reality we all shall know. What has already silenced the voices of spring in countless towns in America? This book is an attempt to explain. (10)

There’s a sort of push and pull even in Carson’s early work, which appears later as well. She writes as a scientist, but she is never entirely disinterested or “objective.” She’s a passionate writer, which, frankly, is something at which some modern scientists might scoff.

In terms of children’s literature, we can see both how Carson’s writing developed (and in some ways stayed the same) over many years. Yet we can also see that even in the children’s literary periodical St. Nicholas, children can advance a scientific ideology or points of view in their writing. In this sense, children’s writing can have incredible persuasive force.

“Oil is Fun, Kids!”

Artwork from Deep Treasure by Olds.

Like all literature, children’s literature constitutes our social realities. It can tell us truths and espouse ideologies, and it can also be used for potentially nefarious reasons. While Elizabeth Olds’s Deep Treasure: A History of Oil (1958) may not explicitly promote oil consumption, it does participate in a broader discourse that assumes oil should be a normal part of our everyday lives. Some scholars of modernism call this “petro-modernism,” which simply refers to the ways we’ve become reliant on fossil fuels as a norm, especially in everyday life due to car culture, planes, and so forth.

Deep Treasure is fascinating, in part because of Olds’s modernist illustration techniques (some pictures look like they could be part of a Cubist exhibit alongside Picasso or Braque). The story uses scientific language to show the history of oil, yet the narrative subtly leads us to the conclusion that oil use is natural and good.

For example, the story starts with “Drake’s Folly,” Edwin Drake’s attempts to be the first to drill for oil in the US. Later renamed “Drake’s Triumph,” this opening section creates a story of conquest. Finally, the story implies, we had been blessed with a genius daring enough to drill for “deep treasure.” Modern readers would recognize that this is not just a history lesson but a sort of training; i.e., children are inculcated in a society that praises oil.

The next section documents the deep history of oil–its primordial origins, different topographies where it can be found, and so forth. The storybook ends by lauding over all that oil has brought: “Petroleum has transformed whole nations, has changed the way we move, what we wear, eat and play with–all of this from the same type of sticky substance the Indians, centuries ago, scooped up so patiently from seeping ground and scummy stream.” The sense of “civilizing technology” is especially apparent in this last line about how Native Americans never fully realized the power of petroleum. It implies that it wasn’t until Westerners arrived that the land could be used “properly” (which we might now view as questionable if not outright inaccurate).

I’m often torn when reading Olds’s book because it is so beautiful, and elsewhere she’s a proponent of laborers who sacrificed so much to power American industry. But Deep Treasure is, undeniably, a good example of how children’s literature can be used to perpetuate ideologies. It trains us to think about oil in a particular way that would make topics like green energy harder to stomach.

In the end, both of these examples–stories by Rachel Carson and Elizabeth Olds–are good examples of children’s books that shape scientific understanding. It’s easy to dismiss these stories, but, in reality, the children’s book industry has always played a substantial role in shaping culture. The next chance you get, return to a beloved children’s book from your youth and reflect on what it’s truly saying. You might be surprised.

Radium Age Fiction and Nuclear Energy

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With the recent announcement that researchers have achieved nuclear fusion, atomic energy is once again in the news. But debates surrounding nuclear energy have actually existed before fission was fully realized. As H. Bruce Franklin notes, “for fifty years, the first atomic explosion in Robert Cromie’s 1895 novel The Crack of Doom until 1945, nuclear weapons existed nowhere but in science fiction” (131). H. G. Wells was the first to coin the phrase the “splitting of the atom,” and writers such as Karel Čapek explored the impact of atomic energy on sustainability and human progress.

Put differently, many of the debates surrounding nuclear energy — its benefits and dangers — are deeply impacted by literature, film, and other cultural products.

This is important to understand because, as Ann Stouffer Bisconti notes, one of the greatest factors shaping the public opinion about nuclear energy is media representation — whether real or fictional stories. For example, something like the Chernobyl disaster is relatively rare for nuclear reactors, but it received extensive media coverage and is still widely discussed today. This includes fictional stories about Chernobyl, such as the five-part HBO series by the same name. In short, stories matter, especially when it comes to environmental discourse.

Sci-Fi and Nuclear Disaster

Several scholars explore the cultural fascination with nuclear apocalypse as well as indirect reactions to the Atomic Age. For example, Cyndy Hendershot notes that many of the B-movies from the 1950s and 1960s — such as It Came from Outer Space (1953), The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), and Them! (1954) — may be a sort of psychological displacement about the horrors of nuclear annihilation. In other words, people struggle to deal with the fact that humans have created world-ending technologies, so “monster flicks” are a way of confronting our fears — at least indirectly.

Susan Sontag similarly wrote about this issue in a now-famous essay called “The Imagination of Disaster.” Why are people so captivated by disaster films, especially in science-fiction? Sontag theorizes that there’s a convergence between “high-brow” philosophical issues about the ethics of nuclear power (and nuclear weapons) and the “low-brow” B-movie genre. We should analyze film as an expression of cultural anxiety, for Sontag, precisely because it’s not rigid, academic discourse.

This view has had some effect, as many film viewers can’t see Godzilla as anything other than an allegory for nuclear war. But looking to cultural products like science-fiction is an important way to continue studying — including writers like Karel Čapek, who may not be a household name for Americans (yet!).

The Radium Age: Nuclear Before Nuclear

Cultural artifacts such as film and literature offer insights about how we discuss nuclear power today, because many of these films and books deal with the same issues. But these early films and novels are perhaps more notable, because they had these conversations before fission technology even existed.

Joshua Glenn describes an entire movement or “era” that pre-dates fission as the “Radium Age.” H. G. Wells, Robert Cromie, and others knew about radioactivity (radium, in particular, was widely discussed in the early twentieth century), and therefore imagined the many things that could be made from it. Cromie saw disaster as imminent; Wells imagined a utopic vision of a world forced into pacifism by the threat of nuclear holocaust.

For me, though, one writer stands out: Karel Čapek (pronounced cha-pek). Čapek wrote two novels around the same time dealing with nuclear power, The Absolute at Large (1922) and Krakatit (1924). And the former is really about what happens when we do achieve sustainability. Is it really enough to have the technology, or is there perhaps more at play, like politics and rhetoric?

Čapek’s Portrayal of Nuclear Energy

Čapek is perhaps best-known today for introducing the term “robot” along with his brother Josef in the 1920 play R. U. R. (which stands for “Rossum’s Universal Robots”). Čapek wrote extensively, and is one of the most influential Czech-language writers in history. His journalism and nonfiction are just as powerful as his novels and plays, particularly his writings about anti-fascism and anti-authoritarianism.

The Absolute at Large follows the development of nuclear energy through the creation of the “Karburator,” a technology vaguely described in the book as using atomic energy to create virtually unlimited power. There’s one horrible side effect: the technology releases the “Absolute,” a transcendent, possibly spiritual, force that drives humanity to fanaticism.

Čapek uses nuclear energy as a metaphor for political division and authoritarianism, a problem he recognized would become increasingly dire in the twentieth century. But his story’s reliance on atomic energy roughly 15 years before fission was fully realized is important because it shows the role of imagination in shaping public opinion.

In many ways, the technology works well: it creates energy like it should. The engineer who creates the Karburator realizes that there’s a side effect when you destroy matter (at least in this fictional world). The primordial memories of the universe, as well as the power of the Absolute (which seems to have a mind of its own), is no longer constricted by matter. Therefore, Čapek raises a fundamental question: simply because you can create a technology, does it mean you should?

The Absolute at Large is a good read for any sci-fi buff. It’s an interesting concept, and Čapek occasionally uses experimental writing techniques, especially toward the end of the book. He asks big questions about historiography (how we write history after major world events) and what he views as the key problem of environmental sustainability: Sustainability is not simply a technological problem, but it is also an ethical one.

We need humanists, novelists, journalists, and philosophers, to help us navigate the ethical and rhetorical dilemmas posed by sustainability. More people should study and read Radium Age fiction if they really want to understand the nuances of the nuclear debate (and also find some really good science fiction), and Čapek is a great place to start.

Sources

Bisconti, Ann Stouffer, “Changing public attitudes toward nuclear energy.” Progress in Nuclear Energy, vol. 102, 2018, pp. 103-113, doi.org/10.1016/j.pnucene.2017.07.002.

Čapek, Karel. The Absolute at Large. University of Nebraska Press, 2005.

Franklin, H. Bruce. War Stars: The Superweapon and the American Imagination. Oxford UP, 1988.

Glenn, J. “Science Fiction: The Radium Age.” Nature, vol. 489, no. 1, 2012, pp. 204–205.

Hendershot, Cyndy. “From Trauma to Paranoia: Nuclear Weapons, Science Fiction, and History.” Mosaic, vol. 32, no. 4, 1999. Reproduced in Mosaic, 54.2 (2021): 37-54.

Sontag, Susan. “The Imagination of Disaster.” Against Interpretation and Other Essays, Ancho, 1966, pp. 201-25.

Bioethics, Books, and Robert Louis Stevenson

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Bioethics is a broad term used to refer to the ways we assign value to living organisms (human or otherwise). Most commonly used in medical institutions, the term bioethics is gaining wider usage outside of hospitals and medical schools. In particular, bioethical concerns in the humanities and social sciences often revolve around disability studies, animal studies, ecocriticism, and the various ways medical and biological discourses are intimately connected to culture.

In this sense, we might think of bioethics as an important link between the humanities and sciences, one that combines central topics in science and medicine with the major methodologies and critical theories most closely associated with the humanities. In fields such as disability studies and animal studies, many scholars insist on ethical approaches that have little to do with the hospital review boards that are most commonly signified by the word “bioethics.” For instance, scholars in recent years have written about how we represent physical disability in popular literature and culture, the commonplace philosophical assumptions that reinforce the human-animal divide, or the ways environmental science is often subject to popular cultural trends.

Science and Culture

There are sometimes arbitrary distinctions between science and culture, many of which concern the methods and approaches used by various scholars. A biologist and a philosopher might both try to answer the question of what it means to be human, but the former will likely consider the nature of the body or physical evolution while the latter might look at how definitions of the human change over historical periods. Neither is “more right” than the other; instead, what distinguishes the two is largely due to their approach.

When we consider bioethics in literary and cultural studies, we might keep the above example in mind. If we think about how to define “disability,” for instance, a medical practitioner will likely be able to develop a very specific definition; however, literary scholars such as Lennard Davis—to name one among many—will show that “disability” is a relatively new concept, one intimately related to the rise of “normalcy” and the novel in the nineteenth century. (For more information, see Davis’s Enforcing Normalcy.)

The same might be said of animal studies or environmental studies; scientists are hard at work investigating how certain animals feel pain, while others are developing objective methods for showing the devastating effects of the current climate crisis. However, many humanities scholars are aware that when discussing animal experience, we need to investigate the ways language and metaphor often limit our understanding. Or, in the context of climate change, we should consider the rhetorical strategies needed to convince people that we should act now to enact public policy. Facts and figures are important, but many people don’t make decisions based on matters of fact—that’s where rhetorical argumentation (a field of focus in English) becomes an important skill to leverage.

To suggest that science and the humanities (i.e., culture) are mutually exclusive is to ignore the ways discourse operates across disciplinary boundaries. And, the humanities scholar who ignores science or the scientist who ignores the humanities are less likely to make valuable contributions to our society.

Bioethics in the Text: Jekyll and Hyde

So where does ethics come into play? Recent trends in literary and cultural studies have shifted focus to questions of the body as well as questions of ethics (sometimes called “the ethical turn”). Philosophers such as Martha Nussabaum, in Love’s Knowledge, have reinforced the idea that literature is a valuable site through which we can frame our ethical queries. Literature shows us the real-world complexities of life through which we can raise questions about ethics, an approach that is much more helpful than oversimplified thought-experiments. And, considering the impact of authors such as Judith Butler—who revolutionized definitions of gender and performativity with books like Gender Trouble and Bodies that Matter—we now know that bodies are never just there, that they are instead embedded in discourse.

When considering bioethics in literary texts, we might look to Robert Louis Stevenson’s famous book The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. (See my essay on medical quackery and Stevenson’s book here.) RLS’s book is commonly taught as an allegory for good and evil–the idea is that we all have this struggle between the two within us. While this is an easy interpretation to digest for most high schoolers, it’s also one that doesn’t address the historical context of the book. And, the good/evil reading is also a bit oversimplified; Stevenson’s writing is much too nuanced for such a cut-and-dry dichotomy.

Stevenson wrote the novella following a series of medical and pharmaceutical acts in the late nineteenth century, and many of the book’s themes reflect a growing ambivalence toward medical institutionalization. For example, Jekyll doesn’t become evil after ingesting his concoction; instead, he seeks an “avatar” to hide his unsavory tendencies from the start. And, Jekyll never actually knows how he created the drug that transformed him into Hyde—it’s implied that it is actually the result of a contaminated shipment of salts. So, the expert doctor in this book is really more of an evil quack.

While there is some deeply harmful skepticism toward medical professionals today (most of which is the result of outlandish conspiracy theories), what Stevenson reveals in Jekyll and Hyde is that mistrust in medical expertise has been around for years. Many medical and pharmaceutical regulations in Britain in the nineteenth century were partly the result of professional spats and political debates (consider, for instance, the establishment of the Pharmaceutical Society in Britain to displace the authority of apothecaries, or the delayed outlawing of opium as a ‘schedule one’ poison), enacting a disciplinary regime that exists to this day. Stevenson exaggerates the mistrust between the public and medical institutions in Jekyll and Hyde, but what he also points to is a growing rift between science and the humanities.

A “bioethical” approach to Stevenson’s iconic story—a novella that’s now been adapted countless times—helps to foreground the ways in which science and the humanities are deeply interconnected. Stevenson traces a growing ambivalence toward medical professionals in the late nineteenth century following a string of medical laws, raising important questions about the power dynamics that often exist between the patient and doctor, between medical institutions and the general public. What we can learn from Stevenson’s book is the ways public perception toward science and medicine is shaped, as well as the ways in which language and law in turn configure science and medicine.

Stevenson is at times vague about the specific medical and pharmaceutical practices of Dr. Jekyll, but what The Strange Case does emphasize is the need for ethical thought in medical and scientific practice. Jekyll’s research is notoriously self-serving; while Hyde is most clearly the villain, Jekyll isn’t much better. Stevenson doesn’t necessarily propose a clear ethical framework in the language of philosophy (e.g., deontology, virtue epistemology, normative ethics, utilitarianism), but what he does provide is a critique of medicine that’s been divorced from humanistic inquiry.