Rachel Carson could be considered the founder of the environmental protection movement. Though she died in 1964, her legacy is a totally turned-around vision of what nature is and how we are supposed to deal with it.
Imagine in the 1950s when people dumped their trash into SF Bay or their nearby rivers, streams, and empty lots. Imagine people throwing bottles, cans, bags, and cigarettes out their car windows. Imagine waterways so pulluted they could literally catch on fire. .
Imagine the regimen of spraying 2 POUNDS of DDT onto fruit trees to protect them from bugs, winding up killing the bugs, the trees, the birds that ate the bugs, the cats that captured the birds. Imagine the skin rashes and sickness experienced by the cat owners. DDT went up the food chain until it was a menace to health worldwide
All this was happening prior to Rachel Carson's groundbreaking book, "Silent Spring". The oil companies had created pesticides for warfare in World War II that had never been tested for safety by anybody. It was a very different world then.
But she was not lauded at the time of her book. She was called a communist. Politicians said that she was stifling the recovering U.S. economy. Though she was a biologist with 2 previously lauded biology books, she was called ignorant and stupid.
TONIGHT AT 8:00pm, City Arts & Lectures presents a play about Rachel Carson, a one-woman play performed by Kaiulani Lee. I heard the program over the weekend, and it was a riveting driveway listen.
KQED-FM 88.5 Tonight (Tuesday), 8pm
Imagine in the 1950s when people dumped their trash into SF Bay or their nearby rivers, streams, and empty lots. Imagine people throwing bottles, cans, bags, and cigarettes out their car windows. Imagine waterways so pulluted they could literally catch on fire. .
Imagine the regimen of spraying 2 POUNDS of DDT onto fruit trees to protect them from bugs, winding up killing the bugs, the trees, the birds that ate the bugs, the cats that captured the birds. Imagine the skin rashes and sickness experienced by the cat owners. DDT went up the food chain until it was a menace to health worldwide
All this was happening prior to Rachel Carson's groundbreaking book, "Silent Spring". The oil companies had created pesticides for warfare in World War II that had never been tested for safety by anybody. It was a very different world then.
But she was not lauded at the time of her book. She was called a communist. Politicians said that she was stifling the recovering U.S. economy. Though she was a biologist with 2 previously lauded biology books, she was called ignorant and stupid.
TONIGHT AT 8:00pm, City Arts & Lectures presents a play about Rachel Carson, a one-woman play performed by Kaiulani Lee. I heard the program over the weekend, and it was a riveting driveway listen.
KQED-FM 88.5 Tonight (Tuesday), 8pm