The four famous fish ended up in the Mississippi, at least in part, owing to Silent Spring—another Anthropocene irony. In the book, whose working title was The Control of Nature, Rachel Carson denounced the very idea. “The ‘control of nature’ is a phrase conceived in arrogance, born of the Neanderthal age of biology and philosophy, when it was supposed that nature exists for the convenience of man,” she wrote. Herbicides and pesticides represented the very worst kind of “cave man” thinking—a club “hurled against the fabric of life.”
