Grand Opening of the Rachel Carson Center in Munich

Written by Julia Staudinger

Sunday, 04 July 2010 00:00

With thousands of barrels of oil still spilling into the Gulf of Mexico since the disastrous explosion on the Deepwater Horizon oil platform of BP on April 22, 2010, the Opening Ceremony of the newly founded Rachel Carson Center in Munich gained a lot of attention last Thursday. The reason for this, of course, is its focus on environment and the society. But those are not exactly very broad concepts. So what is it the RCC doing and what is this new center standing for?

At the press conference an hour before the event five persons are sitting in front of the press. Christof Mauch, director of the RCC and Chair in American History, Helmuth Trischler, also Director of the RCC and Head of Research at the Deutsches Museum. The three keynote speakers are there as well. Jane Carruthers, Chair of the RCC advisory board and Professor at the University of South Africa, Yolanda Kakabadse, President of the World Wildlife Foundation International and former Ecuadorian Minister of Environment, and Vandana Shiva, World Future councillor and Alternative Nobel Prize Winner.
Christof Mauch describes the major tasks of the RCC in its oncoming six years of assured existence: global and interdisciplinary networking and a dialogue with the public. He says the motor for federal funding was to “make sure that the German humanities get out of their provincialism.” And this is true. The Center is not going to organise activists. Nor is it providing solutions for man-made catastrophes. It is not even working like a conventional think tank, which means advising politics or economics directly. But on the inside its processes are comparable to that of a think tank. A platform for international specialists from various fields of research is provided, to gap the bridge between humanities and the natural and social sciences. There scholars from all over the world can work on their research topics – varying from dairy farming to asbestos – funded by scholarships, bring in their own ideas into the discussion as well as taking home new ideas. The “products” this highly intellectual climate creates reach out for the public as Helmut Trischler explains. A book series, international conferences, lectures, workshops, and a digital archive for environmental history and topics are planned. Is there nothing more than talking and writing?
It is helpful to look at the reason for the naming of the Center. Rachel Carson, an American marine biologist, wrote a book in 1962, called Silent Spring. This book is about the effect of the usage of pesticides, mainly DDT, on an ecosystem, pointing at the problem that eradicating vermin can affect another species as indirectly as greatly. Simplyfied: if you kill all the insects, what are the birds going to eat? And this was not the only effect of DDT as we know today. When asked by matchless all participants of the press conference come up with their own reasons why they consider Rachel Carson’s book so important. Vandana Shiva mentions the spirit of never giving up fighting against big business, whereas Yolanda Kakabadse refers to the many questions she posed in her book, that the succeeding generation are still trying to answer. Christof Mauch puts Carson’s book into historical perspective when he says: “The Environmental Movement that started in the 1960s was to such a large extent triggered by Rachel Carson’s ideas and the first generation of environmental historians came out of the environmental movement.” In the course of this movement DDT, by then as widely acknowledged as insecticide as gas is today for moving a car, was finally forbidden in 1972. It is this “subversive revolutionary element, the idea of everything is possible” that stands for the project. Everything is possible. Maybe even changing our perspective from humans on a stage with nature as stage design in the background to humans interacting with processes of nature as Jane Carruthers states it.
To sum it up: No, the Rachel Carson Center is not able to stop the oil catastrophe in the Gulf right now like Kevin Costner thought he was. But it is going to influence the public opinion through its various events, communicating an overview of the past and an outlook on the future that can influence politics and decisions made in the course of natural disasters or on damage done by humans. Yes, it is writing books and keeping our scholars busy and paid, but if one book like Silent Spring is produced at the RCC it is going to change the world.