From the Natural Resources Defense Council: Silent SpringThirteen years later, in 1958, Carson's interest in writing about the dangers of DDT was rekindled when she received a letter from a friend in Massachusetts bemoaning the large bird kills which had occured on Cape Cod as the result of DDT sprayings. The use of DDT had proliferated greatly since 1945 and Carson again tried, unsuccessfully, to interest a magazine in assigning her the story of its less desirable effects. By 1958 Carson was a best-selling author, and the fact that she could not obtain a magazine assignment to write about DDT is indicative of how heretical and controversial her views on the subject must have seemed. Having already amassed a large quantity of research on the subject, however, Carson decided to go ahead and tackle the DDT issue in a book. Silent Spring took Carson four years to complete. It meticulously described how DDT entered the food chain and accumulated in the fatty tissues of animals, including human beings, and caused cancer and genetic damage. A single application on a crop, she wrote, killed insects for weeks and months, and not only the targeted insects but countless more, and remained toxic in the environment even after it was diluted by rainwater. Carson concluded that DDT and other pesticides had irrevocably harmed birds and animals and had contaminated the entire world food supply. The book's most haunting and famous chapter, "A Fable for Tomorrow," depicted a nameless American town where all life -- from fish to birds to apple blossoms to human children -- had been "silenced" by the insidious effects of DDT. First serialized in The New Yorker in June 1962, the book alarmed readers across America and, not surprisingly, brought a howl of indignation from the chemical industry. "If man were to faithfully follow the teachings of Miss Carson," complained an executive of the American Cyanamid Company, "we would return to the Dark Ages, and the insects and diseases and vermin would once again inherit the earth." Monsanto published and distributed 5,000 copies of a brochure parodying Silent Spring entitled "The Desolate Year," relating the devastation and inconvenience of a world where famine, disease, and insects ran amuck because chemical pesticides had been banned. Some of the attacks were more personal, questioning Carson's integrity and even her sanity. VindicationHer careful preparation, however, had paid off. Anticipating the reaction of the chemical industry, she had compiled Silent Spring as one would a lawyer's brief, with no fewer than 55 pages of notes and a list of experts who had read and approved the manuscript. Many eminent scientists rose to her defense, and when President John F. Kennedy ordered the President's Science Advisory Committee to examine the issues the book raised, its report thoroughly vindicated both Silent Spring and its author. As a result, DDT came under much closer government supervision and was eventually banned. The public debate moved quickly from whether pesticides were dangerous to which pesticides were dangerous, and the burden of proof shifted from the opponents of unrestrained pesticide use to the chemicals' manufacturers. The most important legacy of Silent Spring, though, was a new public awareness that nature was vulnerable to human intervention. Rachel Carson had made a radical proposal: that, at times, technological progress is so fundamentally at odds with natural processes that it must be curtailed. Conservation had never raised much broad public interest, for few people really worried about the disappearance of wilderness. But the threats Carson had outlined -- the contamination of the food chain, cancer, genetic damage, the deaths of entire species -- were too frightening to ignore. For the first time, the need to regulate industry in order to protect the environment became widely accepted, and environmentalism was born. Carson was well aware of the larger implications of her work. Appearing on a CBS documentary about Silent Spring shortly before her death from breast cancer in 1964, she remarked, "Man's attitude toward nature is today critically important simply because we have now acquired a fateful power to alter and destroy nature. But man is a part of nature, and his war against nature is inevitably a war against himself?[We are] challenged as mankind has never been challenged before to prove our maturity and our mastery, not of nature, but of ourselves." One of the landmark books of the 20th century, Silent Spring's message resonates loudly today, even several decades after its publication. And equally inspiring is the example of Rachel Carson herself. Against overwhelming difficulties and adversity, but motivated by her unabashed love of nature, she rose like a gladiator in its defense.
A good read, especially when the teacher knows its hard for you to find synopses online! Ha! It's only $4 from Amazon. do it! And for further reading, I found a pdf that compares it to another piece of literature. (great for enlightenment)
pdf comparison: http://www.mmisi.org/pr/11_01/webking.pdf http://www.amazon.com/Earth-Under-Siege-Pollution-Global/dp/0195142748
Click the link above. This "book" is like a textbook and is a fantastic resource for nearly every topic we will worry about in the class.... I would see if you can check this out from a library or find it at half price books... Google books: A passionate defender of the environment, Vice President Al Gore described in this now classic best-selling book how the engines of human civilization have brought us to the brink of catastrophe, threatening the destruction of nature and ultimately ourselves. Its groundbreaking analysis placed the environment on the national agenda, prompting politicians, the media, and the public to reckon with a looming disaster. The message remains just as urgent today as it did eight years ago: while much has been accomplished, we are still facing a crisis that reaches into every aspect of society.In brave and unforgettable terms, Earth in the Balance probes the roots of the environmental crisis and offers a bold and forceful vision of a new more sustainable path. Having provoked international discussion on its original publication, it continues to confront us with profound challenges. Human civilization must heal itself, psychologically and spiritually, if we are to heal our ailing environment and savethe earth's ecology for future generations.Now reissued in hardcover with a new introduction bringing the material up-to-date, Vice President Gore's classic will, in the new millennium again be a clarion call to reflect on the fate of our planet
**they have this one in audio book too!!! Wikipedia: Centered around the author's activities as a park ranger at Arches National Monument (now Arches National Park), the book is often compared toThoreau's Walden[citation needed]. It is a series of vignettes about various aspects of his work as a park ranger in the Colorado Plateau region of the desert Southwestern United States, ranging from a polemic against development and excessive tourism in the National Parks, to a story of working with a search and rescue team to pull a dead body out of the desert, to the dangers of hiking alone, to stories of river running, his view of Mormonism, the social life in and around Moab, Utah, and more. Although it is a memoir, it is filled with many interesting, somewhat fictional stories.
Google books: Using the twice-damaged Prince William Sound in Alaska as his stage, nature and science writer Jeff Wheelwright describes what happens to the environment after a catastrophic assault how scientists try to measure the changes and how it is that nature reels and adapts. What happens to wilderness ecosystems when they are struck by environmental disaster? Prince William Sound has experienced two events in the past quarter-century, the 9.2 earthquake of 1964 and the Exxon Valdez oil spill of 1989. Both the natural and manmade disasters are extreme examples of disturbances, and Wheelwright, in this rich ecological history of the Sound, provides many lesser examples. He shows that a healthy natural system is constantly in flux. Animal populations rise and fall; variability and patchiness are the rule. The factors that cause biological change are numerous and overlapping and often can't be sorted out in spite of the best efforts of scientists. But an ecosystem such as Prince William Sound readily recovers from disturbances in part because the disturbances are so routine. In the case of the oil spill, Wheelwright starts with the physical fate of hydrocarbons when they are released in the sea. He explains how scientists tracked the oil through its various marine transformations. He analyzes the shoreline cleanup program, showing how the cleanup was itself a disturbance and yet inferior to the natural cleansing by waves and weather. He appraises the biological effects of hydrocarbons on a range of organisms: from human exposure to oil, through that of seabirds, mammals, fish and invertebrates in the Sound, and lastly to the bacteria stimulated at the base of the food chain. Throughout Wheelwright illuminates the gap between the scientists' measurements of change and the public's understanding of disaster. Wheelwright gives special attention to the sea otter, the most appealing creature of the Sound. He recounts the otter's history, its shocking losses from the oil spill, the rescue efforts on its behalf, and the animal's innate resilience. In an imaginative counterpoint, he compares the sea otter's response to disaster to that of the Native people of the area. Degrees of Disaster is a brilliant and moving account of a natural world, of the humans and animals inhabiting it, and of the struggle to fathom its complexities. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cradle_to_Cradle:_Remaking_the_Way_We_Make_Things
This book, will rock you! (and its made out of recyclable materials!! Super cool) Amazon.com: Michael Shnayerson first traveled to the coal fields four years ago, on assignment for Vanity Fair. There he met an inspiring young lawyer named Joe Lovett, who was fighting mountaintop removal in court with a series of brilliant and daring lawsuits. He also met Judy Bonds, whose grassroots group, the Coal River Mountain Watch, was speaking out in a region where talking truth to power was both brave and dangerous. The two had joined forces to take on Massey Energy, the largest and most aggressive of the coal companies, and its swaggering, notorious chairman, Don Blankenship. Coal River is Shnayerson's account of this dramatic struggle. From courtroom to boardroom, forest clearing to factory floor, Shnayerson gives us a novelistic and compelling portrait of the people who risked their reputations and livelihoods in the fight against King Coal. From Barnes and Noble website: "From the shuttered factories of the Rust Belt to the strip malls of the Sun Belt - and almost everywhere in between - America has been transformed by its relentless fixation on low price. This pervasive yet little-examined obsession is arguably the most powerful and devastating market force of our time - an engine of instability in an increasingly unsettled world. Our fixation on low price has also fueled a surfeit of consumption that threatens our health, imperils our environment, lowers our standard of living, and even skews our concept of time." Low price is so alluring that we have forgotten how thoroughly we once distrusted it. Ellen Ruppel Shell traces the birth of the bargain as we know it from the industrial revolution to the assembly line to discount retailers and beyond. Cheap spotlights colorful characters from F. W. Woolworth to Gene Ferkauf, whose E. J. Korvette discount chain helped wean customers away from traditional notions of value. The rise of the chain store in postwar America led us to favor convenience over quality, and big-box retailers completed our reeducation by making us prize low price in the way we once prized durability and craftsmanship |
Thinking GloballyHere you will find synopses of the books or documentaries from your summer assignment. (Some will even be used throughout the year!) **note: these synopses have been hijacked from reviewer sites to give you a brief overview. The views expressed are not my own and do not substitute you reading/viewing the materials. Archives
March 2015
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