I just completed watching the movie "An American Experience: Rachel Carson," a biography of the renowned naturalist writer of numerous books whose "Silent Spring" became a true world changer.
I recommend viewing this documentary which contains not only details of Carson's personal struggles, but the trials of this nation as it slowly awakened to the threat of a handful of looming and very hidden enemies of the natural world.
At the turn of the 20th Century, DDT was invented, then put on the shelf when it was thought to be of little value. A scientist in 1938 accidentally stumbled upon its effectiveness for the killing of insects, and so, for decades, especially during and after the global wars, DDT became the favorite answer for anything from lice to crop pests.
Gradually, national awareness progressed to the forefront of moral sense when chronic health issues in birds emerged. Pesticide manufacturers denied such accusations and wrote articles against the obvious while numbers of advocates for change increased. .
I spent 35 years working with pesticides, beginning as an extremely naïve professional applicator and ending, many years later, strongly supportive of the adoption of more common sense Integrated Pest Management responses to infestations everywhere.
Rachel Carson's initial works advanced our love for nature from books like "The Sea Around Us" and "Under the Sea Wind". When the pesticide industry refused to admit to the truth, however, this demanded a written rebuttal from her which Carson typed and edited even while in agonizing pain.
Carson was an avid reader and writer, and initially majored in English at Chatham University. It was there where she got her first taste of biology which she hurriedly adopted in place of the humanities.
Gradually dying of cancer that spread from her breasts to her hips, back and brain, Rachel Carson died on April 4, 1964, at age 54. She never married and spent many summers in Maine where she lived in a house she had built mid-state along the rocky shoreline.
I recommend viewing this documentary which contains not only details of Carson's personal struggles, but the trials of this nation as it slowly awakened to the threat of a handful of looming and very hidden enemies of the natural world.
At the turn of the 20th Century, DDT was invented, then put on the shelf when it was thought to be of little value. A scientist in 1938 accidentally stumbled upon its effectiveness for the killing of insects, and so, for decades, especially during and after the global wars, DDT became the favorite answer for anything from lice to crop pests.
Gradually, national awareness progressed to the forefront of moral sense when chronic health issues in birds emerged. Pesticide manufacturers denied such accusations and wrote articles against the obvious while numbers of advocates for change increased. .
I spent 35 years working with pesticides, beginning as an extremely naïve professional applicator and ending, many years later, strongly supportive of the adoption of more common sense Integrated Pest Management responses to infestations everywhere.
Rachel Carson's initial works advanced our love for nature from books like "The Sea Around Us" and "Under the Sea Wind". When the pesticide industry refused to admit to the truth, however, this demanded a written rebuttal from her which Carson typed and edited even while in agonizing pain.
Carson was an avid reader and writer, and initially majored in English at Chatham University. It was there where she got her first taste of biology which she hurriedly adopted in place of the humanities.
Gradually dying of cancer that spread from her breasts to her hips, back and brain, Rachel Carson died on April 4, 1964, at age 54. She never married and spent many summers in Maine where she lived in a house she had built mid-state along the rocky shoreline.
