The term ecology comes from the Greek oikos which means house. House understood as the entire political and productive family unit. It implied the family that owned the land, buildings, livestock, workshops, and production and trade units, as well as all the individuals and families who worked in or depended on the group. The good administration of the house yielded an order of harmony and integration, and its decline or destruction implied ruin for all.

July 1962 marks a milestone in the awakening to the awareness that we, as humanity, were poisoning and therefore destroying our own home. Rachel Carson published Silent Spring, first as a series of articles in the New Yorker, then as a book. Carson came up with this concern years before that. “Intoxicated with the sensation of its own power,” she wrote, “[humanity] seems to advance further and further in experiments for the destruction of itself and its world.” She denounced the irresponsibility of the chemical industry that, under the aura of science and technology and driven by the desire to control the markets and obtain more profits, spread tons of chemical pesticides in the fields without measuring the consequences and their long-term accumulation in the land, crops, livestock and water sources. It also questioned the moral right of the government to approve the use of these products without any control mechanisms, leaving citizens vulnerable to substances that they could not physically avoid or denounce publicly.

The skillful and passionate pen of this woman causes an abrupt awakening to man, intoxicated by the myth of progress and the dominance of science over nature. The chemical industry invested a quarter of a million dollars of the time trying to discredit her, but the alert had been given. The notion that we not only poisoned the earth but that these poisons returned to us in our food, air and water, destroyed the idea that scientific progress could only be beneficial. It also dissolved the boundary between man and nature. The awareness that we are part of the same ecosystem, permeable to the good or bad it may contain, broke through.

Thanks to this and many other efforts, we have awakened to ecological awareness. We know that we share the same fate as other creatures in our ecosystems and across the planet. Despite this, there is still much to do.