Kennedy announced the formation of a special government group to investigate the use and control of pesticides under the direction of the President's Science Advisory Committee (Rachel pp). The book caused a firestorm of public outrage and sold more than a quarter million copies by the end of 1962 (Rachel pp). United State Supreme Court Justice illiam Douglas called it "the most important chronicle of this century for the human race" and Loren Eisely of the University of Pennsylvania described it as a "devastating, heavily documented, relentless attack upon human carelessness, greed and irresponsibility"(Rachel pp). The fervor of the favorable reviews were matched by the intense attacks of the chemical industry and those it influenced, such as the president of the Montrose Chemical Corporation, the nation's largest producer of DDT, who asserted that Carson had written not "as a scientist but rather as a fanatic defender of the balance…...
mlaWorks Cited
Rachel Louise Carson (1907-1964)."
Pennsylvania's Environmental Heritage. http://www.dep.state.pa.us/dep/PA_Env-Her/rachel.htm
Matthiessen, Peter. "Before there was an environmental movement, there was one brave woman and her very brave book." Time. http://www.time.com/time/time100/scientist/profile/carson.html
Orlando, Laura. "From Rachel Carson to Oprah: Forty years after the publication of silent spring, corporations are still producing poisons - and still trying to keep critics from fighting back." Dollars & Sense. March 01, 2002; Pp.
As the eel gets closer to the ocean, the water of course becomes salty and there are new dangers (fishing nets) and unfamiliar eels in the water. But true to her style of providing readers with sidebar stories, the eel passes a clay cliff where "the first eels had come in from the sea eons ago" (p. 228). But Carson doesn't just stop there; there are "teeth, bones, and shells" and the "vertebrae of whales" visible on that clay cliff where a warm sea had "overlain all the coastal plain" millions of years ago. Bringing in geology and paleontology to make her story of birds and marine creatures is classic Carson, and it is what makes her among the most respected naturalist writers in American history.
orks Cited
Bratton, Susan Power. (2004). Thinking Like a Mackerel: Rachael Carson's Under the Sea-ind as a Source for a Trans-Ecotonal Sea Ethic. Ethics & the…...
mlaWorks Cited
Bratton, Susan Power. (2004). Thinking Like a Mackerel: Rachael Carson's Under the Sea-Wind as a Source for a Trans-Ecotonal Sea Ethic. Ethics & the Environment,
9(1), 1-22.
Carson, Rachel. Under the Sea-Wind: A Naturalist's Picture of Ocean Life. New York:
Oxford University Press, 1952.
Silent Spring by Rachel arson
Rachel arson's Silent Spring was published in 1962, 8 years before the birth of the Environmental Protection Agency and more than 50 years before the writing of this essay. At that time, there was little common knowledge about the sometimes terrible effects of chemicals on the environment, plants, animals and humans. arson's unflinching, educated examination and explanation of these effects helped create a dramatic cultural movement that is far more knowledgeable and responsible about the environment and the role of human beings within it.
What lessons does arson extract from the stories about spraying for the gypsy moth and the fire ants?
arson places the chemical campaigns against the gypsy moth and fire ant in the context of a culture conditioned by: chemical industry greed, power and money; government officials' naive acceptance of the chemical industry's claims, issuance of propaganda, misuse of power and negligence; public ignorance and…...
mlaCarson probably knew at least some of this information, for several reasons. First, she was a trained scientist who also happened to suffer from breast cancer and probably researched the topic as thoroughly as possible. In addition, she demonstrated her knowledge by specifically writing about the effects of these poisons, the ecology of the human body and its permeable vulnerability. On the other hand, Science has probably learned a great deal more about chemicals and the body over the past 50 years and since Carson's death. Consequently, it seems fair to say that Carson knew some but not all of the special dangers posed to women by chemicals.
Conclusion
Rachel Carson's Silent Spring is considered by some to be the start of a revolution. When the book was published in 1962, attitudes about chemical companies, government officials and environmental activists were very different. At that time, an ignorant and gullible public was easily duped by the chemical industry and government officials while regarding activists as worse nuisances than the gypsy moth and fire ant. The harmful effects of that culture are shown by Carson's descriptions of the all-out chemical warfare waged against the gypsy moth and the fire ant in 1950's America. In fearlessly and carefully explaining those instances, and in showing the pervasiveness and dangers of poison in our everyday lives, Carson produced a work that is still deemed powerful and revealing half a century after its publication.
Silent Spring
achel Carson's 1962 book Silent Spring is filled with a "hodgepodge of science and junk science," creating a "Disneyfied version of Eden," according to some modern reviewers (Tierney 2007). Such an embittered reaction to one of the most important works in ecology is unwarranted: especially in light of the fact that DDT is the chemical evil that Carson claims it to be and has been banned in most civilized nations. Pesticides promoted by agribusiness has created a litany of problems for human and animal populations, not to mention upsetting the chemical composition of local soils, contaminating drinking water supplies, and causing the creation of superbugs. Carson (1962) might not have gotten everything right in Silent Spring, but she sure comes close, capturing the essence of why agribusiness and the chemical industry conglomerates are failing to make the world a better place. Silent Spring has stood the test of time,…...
mlaReferences
Carson, R. (1962; 2002). Silent Spring. New York: Mariner.
Tierney, J.M. (2007). Carson's "Silent Spring" fails test of time. New York Times. June 6, 2007. Retrieved online: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/05/health/05iht-sntier.1.6003787.html
Rachel Carson's claim "for time is the essential ingredient; but in the modern world there is no time" (Carson 6) is meant to emphasize the fact that humanity has the tendency to ignore factors like the future and their general well-being. People in the contemporary society are obsessed with progress and some are willing to do everything in their power in order to make things happen faster. As a consequence, these individuals express little to no interest in the effects that their actions have on the natural world. Carson most probably wanted her readers to understand that it would be difficult and almost impossible for certain people to turn their attention away from progress as a result of acknowledging that their actions are going to have a negative impact on the environment.
hile time is one of the most important concepts today, people constantly feel that they have very little time.…...
mlaWorks cited:
Carson, R. (2002). Silent Spring. Houghton Mifflin Harcour.
(2008). Global Politics in a Changing World: A Reader. Cengage Learning.
Johnny Carson's primacy in the history of television cannot be understated. Carson's thirty-year stint as the host of NBC's Tonight Show from 1962 to 1992 remains the measuring-stick against which success in the American media must be measured. As Bill Carter -- a New York Times journalist who wrote the substantial history of the machinations and fiascos that ensued when Carson announced his retirement, and the effort to replace Carson began -- states outright "Johnny Carson was the single biggest money generator in television history. He was also the greatest individual star the medium had ever created." (Carter 3). This is astonishing when we consider that Carson took no part in the synergistic strategies that we associate with television in 2012: he did not appear in films, or regularly promote himself elsewhere in the media, he published no memoirs (and indeed published nothing save two joke-books from the earliest years…...
mlaWorks Cited
Carson, Johnny. Happiness is a Dry Martini. New York: Fawcett, 1968. Print.
Carter, Bill. The Late Shift: Letterman, Leno, and the Network Battle for the Night. New York: Hyperion, 1994. Print.
DeMain, Bill. "Sex in a Box: The Twisted History of Twister." Mental Floss. 3 Nov 2011. Web. Accessed at: http://www.mentalfloss.com/blogs/archives/105708
Ess, Ramsey. "Looking Back at Richard Pryor's Return to the Tonight Show." 24 February, 2012. Splitsider. Web. Accessed at: http://splitsider.com/2012/02/looking-back-at-richard-pryors-return-to-the-tonight-show
Rachel Carson, she asserts that water is our most precious natural resource and goes on to state that "most of the earth's abundant water is not usable for agriculture, industry, or human consumption because of its heavy load of sea salts" (1) and therefore "in the midst of this plenty we are in want" (1).
Okay, so let's examine this particular argument; first she says that the earth's abundant water is not usable for consumption etc., due to the fact that the water contains a heavy load of sea salts. Really? Rachel offers no facts and no figures to back up her assertion, instead she implies that we are desperately in need of drinking water because most of the water is so heavily sedated with salt that it is undrinkable.
Even assuming that her assertion was true, the logical answer to the dilemma is that the water would have to be…...
With the advent of Colombo on the American soil, things began to change as Philip J. Deloria asserts in her book Playing Indian (1999): "[T]he self-defining pairing of American truth with American freedom rests on the ability to wield power against Indians... while simultaneously drawing power from them." This is also the basic idea of Shari M. Huhndorf's Going Native: Indians in the American Cultural Imagination. "As white Americans became disenchanted with how American society was developing, they began to reference Indian people and culture as an answer to such problems of a modernizing America as capitalistic greed; alienating, sedentary life-style of the office worker; imperialistic aggressiveness; and racial and gender challenges to white male hegemony" (Barak, 2005).
The Indians progress was challenged by the so-called American School of ethnology. Therein Christianity became a tool in the American colonial project. The development of an ideology based in religion was made…...
ole of females in science [...] achel Carson and Barbara McClintock and compare each scientist to general principals characterizing the careers of women in science.
WOMEN IN SCIENCE
One becomes a scientist by viewing the world in a particular manner; scientists select for study those aspects of the world that are amenable to analysis by scientific methodology. A person acting as a scientist constructs a scientific domain out of the world when s/he adopts a scientific attitude (Grinnell 2).
Most scientists face obstacles at some point in their career. Their research does not produce the results they expected. They lose their funding and must move to another research location. Critics do not agree with their findings or methods. When the scientist is a woman, she often faces even greater obstacles than her male counterparts. achel Carson and Barbara McClintock are two such women scientists, who worked relentlessly toward their goals, and often…...
mlaReferences
Aisenberg, Nadya, and Mona Harrington. Women of Academe: Outsiders in the Sacred Grove. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988.
Carson, Rachel. Silent Spring. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2002.
Editors. "The Barbara McClintock Papers." National Library of Medicine. 20 Sept. 2001. 9 Oct. 2002. http://profiles.nlm.nih.gov/LL/Views/Exhibit/narrative/missouri.html
Grinnell, Frederick. The Scientific Attitude. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1987.
After World War Two, Carson realized the extent to which the government was permitting the use of toxic chemicals and wrote a book to expose the practice. That book was called Silent Spring, and it "challenged the practices of agricultural scientists and the government, and called for a change in the way humankind viewed the natural world."[footnoteef:8] Jensen includes an excerpt from Silent Spring to show that Carson was up against one of the most lucrative industries in the world, and that although her work is unfinished, Carson made a huge impact on raising awareness and eventually her work got DDT banned. [8: "The Life and Legacy of achel Carson," Accessed May 3, 2013, http://www.rachelcarson.org/Biography.aspx#.UYOWMCshKII]
Malcolm X's autobiography was arguably not a project undertaken as a form of muckraker journalism. The author started writing when he was in prison, and he comes to learn the power of the written word…...
mlaReferences
Carson, Rachel. "Silent Spring." Excerpt in Stories that Changed America, edited by Carl Jensen, 117-123.
Daily Censored. "Carl Jensen." Accessed May 3, 2013, http://www.dailycensored.com/writers/carl-jensen/
The Daily Show. "The Daily Show With Jon Stewart," Accessed May 3, 2013, http://www.thedailyshow.com/
Jensen, Carl. Stories that Changed America. New York: Seven Stories, 2002.
The Leblanc alkali production processes were especially pernicious, but they followed along the lines of previous industrial processes. In other words, the first British environmental legislation was a response not so much to a qualitative change in industrial processes and their environmental impact but more to a quantitative increase in sources of pollution that had up to that point been (if only barely) tolerable.
Legislation Arising From Public Anger
At the center of the first British environmental legislation was the Leblanc process, an industrial process that produced of soda ash (which is chemically sodium carbonate) that came into use in the first decades of the 19th century. Named after its inventor, Nicolas Leblanc, it replaced an older process in which soda ash had been produced from wood ash. However, as the availability of wood ash declined (because of deforestation, a process that was occuring both in Great Britain and across Europe…...
mlaResources Act (WRA) of 1991. This act "establishes the duties of the Environment Agency (EA) on flood defence and other areas relating to water management and quality."
"The EA has discretionary powers to improve and maintain river conditions. This means that the EA is not obliged to construct or maintain such works. In practice, the EA will only proceed with schemes that are not only beneficial but cost-effective.
"The Act also grants the EA powers to issue flood warnings and regulate what can be discharged into rivers, estuaries, coastal waters, lakes and groundwaters."
Canadian law on flooding is similarly divided between common law and statutory law.
First Nations
These agents must sustain profitably and prove, economically and logistically why innovative "green" supply chains are realistically more effective than the status quo of historical procurement. Continuing education in both formal and informal fashions must be developed to increase the efficacy of the procurement agent, with regard to "green" purchasing. Changing both large and small organization patterns for procurement can eventually trickle down to even the most uncaring consumers, of which there is a dwindling number. Sroufe, provides a list of environmental performance indicators which have become increasingly important and recognizable issues in today's production society.
2006, p.15) ii) the business reasons for "greener purchasing"
There are literally hundreds of reasons for the development of sustainable business practices, not the least of which is ensuring the long-term existence of the business and production needs.
Among those that are most important are the following:
Sustainable production: Purchasing "green" enhances sustainable production that utilizes the…...
Current events of the environmental ethics
Some of the major current events concerning the environmental ethics are the issue of global warming. One of the leading researchers (in the causes and effects of climate change; and in the field of allergies) in Europe has discovered that the burning of the fossil fuel that has increased over the recent past has resulted into the increase of the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Increase of atmospheric carbon dioxide facilitates the growth of the ragweed- an invasive plant- moreover; the hay fever is triggered of by this plant's pollen grains. Both early and long seasons of allergy are caused by the bloom of the birch trees as a result of the warmer temperatures (White, 1967).
Non-environmentally friendly behaviors currently such as the increased acts of war has not only affected the environment by impoverishing the natural resources but has also caused stress in the livelihood…...
mlaReferences
Carson, R. (1962). Silent Spring. California: Houghton Mifflin.
Van, W., & Peter C. (1997). Primitives in the Wilderness: Deep Ecology and the Missing
Human Subject. New York: SUNY Press.
Varner, G. (1998). In Nature's Interests? Interests, Animal Rights, and Environmental
Along with India, South Africa is perhaps the most prominent country using DDT that has large developed populations. Neither country has reported negative consequences, and many thousands of lives have been saved in both cases.
Ultimately, the use of DDT as a combatant against the spread of malaria has wide-ranging benefits that far outweigh the side effects. Carefully tracking the trajectory of DDT's history demonstrates that most developed nations, including the U.S., took advantage of DDT's benefits during the Global Malaria Eradication Campaign in the 1960s to eliminate the threat of malaria entirely. Their subsequent ban of DDT and the imposition of economic restrictions by the United Nations upon countries still using DDT represent a selective memory at best. The actions of developed nations regarding DDT could also be considered a hypocritical thought process.
egardless, malaria continues to pose a substantial threat to many countries, mostly in Africa. Only closed-mindedness would…...
mlaReferences
Carson, R. (1962). Silent Spring. New York: Houghton-Mifflin.
Chanon, K & Mendez-Galvan, J. (2003). Cooperative Actions to Achieve Malaria
Control Without the Use of DDT. International Journal of Hygiene and Environmental Health, vol. 206, issues 4-5. Retrieved April 6, 2011 from http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL
Curtis, C.F. (1994). Should DDT Continue to be Recommended for Malaria Vector
Aldo Leopold and Environmental History
In answering the question of whether the United States has improved on environmental policy since the 1930s, the cyclical nature of the political system must be considered. A generational reform cycle occurs every 30-40 years, such as the Progressive Era of 1900-20, the New Deal of the 1930s and the New Frontier and Great Society of the 1960s and early-1970s. All of the progress that the United States has made in conservation, wilderness preservation and other environmental issues has happened in these reform eras. Barack Obama represents yet another reform cycle and his environmental record is better by far than any other president over the last forty years, although much of what he attempted to accomplish has been blocked by the Republicans and the corporate interests that fund them. In conservative eras like the 1920s, 1950s and 1980s and 1990s, almost nothing worthwhile happens with environmental…...
Literature can serve as a powerful tool for promoting awareness and advocating for the preservation of aquatic wildlife sustainability. Through various strategies, writers and authors can bring attention to the critical issues facing our oceans, rivers, and lakes. By highlighting the beauty and importance of aquatic ecosystems, literature can inspire readers to take action and make a difference in protecting these precious resources. This literature review will explore some of the strategies used in literature to promote awareness for preserving aquatic wildlife sustainability. One effective strategy used in literature is the use of vivid descriptions and imagery to bring aquatic....
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