A Tale of Two Citations: Rachel Carson's "Silent Spring" and Michael Harrington's "The Other America"
Contrasting Lessons for Activists
Cohen, Mitchel
http://www.counterpunch.org/2019/02/18/a-tale-of-two-citations-rachel-carsons-silent-spring-and-mich
Date Written: 2019-02-18
Publisher: CounterPunch
Year Published: 2019
Resource Type: Article
Cx Number: CX23519
Looking at the forgotten, more radical aspects of Carson's "Silent Spring." Compares it with other, less radical works that were more easily co-opted by governments looking to appease new social and environmental movements.
Abstract:
--
Excerpt:
If, as Milán Kundera writes, "the struggle of human beings against power is, in some important sense, the struggle of memory against forgetting," then today, from a vantage of more than half-a-century, we need to look anew at that history and restore the role those women played in building the movement to oppose DDT and in mobilizing to ban the bomb. The decimation of song birds and birds of prey due to DDT spraying merged with otherlife-and-death matters in the 1960s, and "spurred scientists, emanating primarily from the left, to raise searching questions about the destructiveness of our civilization," John Bellamy Foster and Brett Clark wrote in a revelatory 2017 article in Monthly Review. "From this work the modern ecology movement emerged." Rachel Carson inspired thousands to join an environmental movement that did not separate condemnation of chemical pesticides from support for banning the bomb. The issues were organically related and indivisible, and the joining of both efforts helped spur an emerging social-ecological sensibility.
Subject Headings
