Rachel Carson and the Environmental Movement

After watching the documentary about Rachel Carson and the Environmental Movement in class today, I read up a bit more about Rachel Carson and found that she did more for the movement and received greater acclaim than I had previously realized.  For this reason I decided to write this blog to tell just a bit more abut her life, achievements, and impact on environmentalism.

Receiving the honor of the Presidential Medal of Freedom from Jimmy Carter after she died, the conservationist Rachel Carson (1907-1964) was publicly recognized for her grass roots environmental work that led to the creation of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.  The influential and sometimes controversial naturalist, Rachael Carson was born on a small farm in Pennsylvania in 1907, completed a masters in zoology, and worked as an aquatic biologist for the Bureau of Fisheries, later to become the Fish and Wildlife Service.  As a naturalist, her many publications, books, and documentary films centered on the ocean environment and on ocean history, from which she was awarded two honorary doctorates.  Interestingly, after selling the rights to what would become her Oscar awarded documentary, the scientific content was altered in such significantly untrue ways that Carson never sold film rights to her work again.  Three of her most acclaimed books are a trilogy that includes The Sea Around Us (on the N.Y. Best Seller list for 86 weeks), Under the Sea Wind, and The Edge of the Sea.  In the 1940s, Carson became a leading conversationalist, focusing on building public awareness of the dangers of pesticide overuse.  Her book Silent Spring, which forewarns a bleak future for the natural world, helped launch the environmental movement.  Carson brought to public attention the effects of synthetic pesticides, including DDT, that had largely been developed through military funding of science after World War II.  Through her efforts, grass roots organizations developed to oppose government spraying programs of pesticides that Carson made evident were cancer causing. The Silent Spring, impacted the social movement in the 1960s offering evidence of the effects of pollution on health and the environment, leading to the deep ecology and ecofeminism movements.  Her legacy that led to the formation of the Environmental Defense Fund, was her campaign against DDT use.  Importantly, as a result of Carson’s work in illuminating the conflict of interest of the same governmental agency being responsible for both the regulating of pesticides and the promoting of agriculture industry concerns, the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency was formed after her death.  Her opponents in the 21^st Century blame Carson for third world deaths attributed to anti-malarial spraying policies, for which Carson is not responsible through her efforts to ban DDT for U.S. agricultural use in the 1960s. Carson further left to the next generations’ parents an essay, A Sense of Wonder, that exhorts parents to infuse their children’s experiences with the influence and the wonder of the natural world.  

My question for you all is:  Considering what Rachel Carson did to promote her environmental beliefs in the mid 20^th century, what do we need to do now, fifty years later, to help our planet?  How has the situation gotten better?  How has it gotten worse?

Sources: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rachel_Carson
              http://www.rachelcarson.org/