Rachel Carson . Then came an incendiary book that sowed seeds of doubt. Archival: . Up to now 5. Silent Spring has been called the most controversial book of the year. Narrator: At the eye of the storm was Rachel Carson, one of the most celebrated American writers of her time. With her first three books –– a lyrical trilogy about the sea –– Carson had opened people's eyes to the natural world. Now, in Silent Spring, she delivered the dark warning that they might soon destroy it. Archival: . Whereas the modern chemist, the modern biologist, the modern scientist believes that man is steadily controlling nature. ![]() Get started with deep learning today. Rapidly build models for Theano and TensorFlow using the Keras library. Get your copy of Deep Learning With Python. Mark Lytle, Historian: It was sort of the gospel at the time that human ingenuity would triumph over nature; what Carson was arguing was for caution. She really confronted the orthodoxies of her time. Naomi Oreskes, Historian: She was accused of being a Communist, of being a hysterical, female Luddite. The reaction was to attack the messenger. Narrator: Carson was an unlikely heretic. Dutiful, demure, and so jealous of her solitude that her most intimate relationship was conducted mainly through letters, she'd thrust herself into the public eye –– all the while harboring a secret that was literally killing her. To some, Silent Spring was an act of heroism; to others, an irresponsible breach of scientific objectivity. But there could be no dispute that with her rebuke to modern technological science, Carson had shattered a paradigm. William Souder, Biographer: Rachel Carson not only changed the kind of questions we ask about the environment; I think she caused us to start to ask those questions. She’s the instigator. Narrator: In mid- July 1. Second World War ground on in the Pacific and weary Americans scanned the morning's headlines for the word . A writer by inclination and a biologist by training, she'd spent much of the previous decade in the employ of the U. S. Fish and Wildlife Service, overseeing publications about its conservation work. The job paid the bills; but Carson craved a wider audience. Now, the agency had undertaken a study she felt warranted public attention. As she put it in a letter to the popular monthly Reader's Digest: . It was first synthesized back in the 1. Nobody knew if it did anything, if it had any useful purpose, until 1. Swiss chemist named Paul M. Several hours elapse before symptoms develop; then in sequence follows restlessness, tremors, convulsions, paralysis, and death. Deborah Blum, Science Writer: Farmers have been doing war with insects and other pests for a long time and they had been using what we think of now as almost obviously homicidal poisons to do that. But for the first time we have a sort of new generation pesticide. It’s a whole new fascinating kind of chemical formula that's not obviously toxic to people and insects are dying all over the place. Narrator: After the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the U. S. Its crowded population lacked almost everything for the safeguarding of public health. The perfect set- up for epidemic. David Kinkela, Historian: Naples is really a city under siege. And typhus spreads quickly under those kinds of conditions. So they set up spray stations in the cities, spraying thousands of people a day with hand sprayers –– people who wanted to get sprayed, people who didn’t wanna get sprayed, children, elderly. Archival: Next, the 4. Italians dwelling in the jam- packed air raid shelters were deloused. Narrator: In all, more than a million people were dusted with DDT, and the epidemic was stopped in its tracks. He said, “I have one in the front, one in reserve, and one in the hospital” because of malaria. But with DDT that problem diminished substantially. It was considered to be a miracle substance in that it saved hundreds of thousands of lives. Narrator: By the middle of 1. TIME magazine had pronounced DDT “one of the great scientific discoveries of World War II.” To Reader's Digest, Rachel Carson was offering a new angle –– a piece exploring DDT's potential to cause collateral damage to wildlife. Naomi Oreskes, Historian: Biologists for the Fish and Wildlife Service begin to see pretty quickly that when DDT is used in certain areas there’s evidence of problems. There’s evidence of fish kill or bird kill and they see that and like any expert they publish it in a place where other experts will read it. But how that information then filters out to a larger public is a very big question. William Souder, Biographer: Carson understood the implications of this. She wanted to write a story warning people that, “We need to be a little bit careful with this. This looks like it’s a great thing but we maybe need to be cautious in how we use it, how much of it we use.”Linda Lear, Biographer: But Reader’s Digest doesn't want this article. They essentially say, “Oh, housewives would be just turned off by this. They wouldn’t wanna know about this terrible stuff so no. No, thank you.”Archival: The victory flash electrified Times Square keyed to the bursting point as the magic word of complete surrender came through. Narrator: Just weeks later, the war in the Pacific finally was won, and credit for the victory went to the twin weapons of modern science: the atomic bomb and the so- called . And so people considered this a real triumph of human ingenuity over the old pestilences of, of nature that had made life nasty, brutish, and short. Deborah Blum, Science Writer: So people just went, “Wow. We have this incredibly potent compound, doesn’t cause any harm to anything but bugs. We’ll just use it everywhere.”Archival: I consider this amazing chemical the most valuable contribution of our wartime medical research program for the future health and welfare not only of this nation, but of the entire world. Narrator: Carson's misgivings about DDT were not assuaged. But she was in no position to spend time on a story she couldn't sell. Linda Lear, Biographer: She really is pretty certain that synthetic pesticides are not good for the environment, and that they have the power to destroy, which is not being made clear to anybody. But Reader’s Digest doesn’t think so. So she gives it up. She puts it away. But it really doesn’t go away. Voice: Rachel Carson: I can remember no time, even in earliest childhood, when I didn’t assume I was going to be a writer. Also, I can remember no time when I wasn’t interested in the out- of- doors and the whole world of nature. Those interests, I know, I inherited from my mother and have always shared with her. Narrator: She was, from the very beginning, her mother's child. A former schoolteacher of stern Presbyterian stock, Maria Carson had given up her career for marriage and motherhood –– only to find herself alone among strangers. Her husband Robert, while well- meaning, had never managed to provide more than a meagre existence. The family's clapboard house, on the Allegheny River just north of Pittsburgh, lacked both central heating and running water throughout the 2. Carsons occupied it. Maria's two older children already were school- aged when their younger sister was born, and already showed a marked lack of interest in their mother's passions. Rachel would be different. William Souder, Biographer: Maria Carson was an educated woman and a woman who enjoyed reading. She enjoyed music. She was a person who, to some degree, lived a life of the mind. Robert K. Musil, Environmental Scientist: She focused and passed this all on to Rachel. She was ambitious for her daughter. This was her youngest, brightest, frankly favorite child and so she wanted her to get a good education. Narrator: Inspired by a popular educational movement which held that children should . Her mother taught her to be rigorous in her observation but it also of course deepened her relationship with her mother. Narrator: She was the solitary sort of girl who greeted the birds on the way to school in the morning and was partial to the companionship of books. At the age of eight, she was writing stories of her own. At ten, at her mother's urging, Rachel entered a contest sponsored by the popular children's magazine St. Nicholas and became a published author. By fourteen, she was submitting her work to magazines for sale. Robert K. Musil, Environmental Scientist: If we picture a girl in a small farm in Nowhere, Pennsylvania who is transported through literature and can imagine being elsewhere, I think she was led to see that as something that she could do, and it was constantly reinforced. Linda Lear, Biographer: Maria Carson had always wanted to go to college and couldn’t so she was going to be quite sure that this daughter, this smart daughter, was gonna go to college. Narrator: When Rachel won a scholarship to Pennsylvania College for Women, Maria sold off even the family china to help cover her daughter's expenses, then made the 3. Pittsburgh most weekends to visit her. William Souder, Biographer: She was the star pupil. Everyone realized right away what a talented writer she was and also saw that this was her ambition in life that she wanted to be a writer. So it came as a great shock when she fell in love with biology. The science of life just struck a chord in her that I think she didn’t realize was there. Narrator: Thrilled by the prospect of understanding the natural world she'd been taught to so closely observe, Carson changed her major from English to biology and announced her intention to go on to graduate school. She spent the next two years taking courses in zoology, physiology, anatomy. But her true interest only revealed itself after graduation –– when she landed a coveted research spot at the Marine Biology Laboratory in Wood's Hole, Massachusetts, and for the first time in her life laid eyes on the ocean. Linda Lear, Biographer: She’s moved beyond just the ordinary person would be moved who would have seen the ocean for the first time. The sea taught her everything that she later came to want to understand and want the world to understand, that everything was connected to everything else.
1 Comment
9/16/2020 12:21:44 am
For Latest Celebrity News
Reply
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. Archives
August 2017
Categories |