(HOST) In the year ahead, commentator Ted Levin says we’ll be celebrating an important milestone in the way that we view the world – the one hundredth anniversary of the birth of one of the most influential writers of the 20th century.
(LEVIN) Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, which John Kenneth Galbraith described as one of the most important books of Western literature, ignited a worldwide debate on the direction of technological progress and the degradation of the quality of life, a debate that still rages. Read: global warming and genetic engineering among scores of other issues. The Boston Globe once put Carson’s legacy in perspective – quote – “A few thousand words from her and the world took a new direction.” End of quote.
The impact of Silent Spring, a runaway bestseller, is frequently compared to that of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species.
Google Silent Spring and you get 3,250,000 hits, more than for either Babe Ruth or Queen Elizabeth. The very title – Silent Spring – has become a metaphor for environmental ills. Prior to its publication the words environment and ecology, were not even part of the public lexicon. Few had ever heard of a food web — or of biological magnification.
The ramifications from Silent Spring not only broadened our vocabulary it broadened the scope of higher education. Forty-four years after its publication, North American schools now offer eleven undergraduate majors in environmentally related fields that include seven hundred and seventeen institutions that confer degrees in environmental studies, more than two hundred each in environmental science and environmental health, and more than one hundred in environmental engineering and environmental biology. You have fifty-four schools to choose from if you wish to study environmental health, forty-nine if you wish to study environmental architecture, thirty-nine for environmental control, fifteen for environmental education, and three for environmental toxicology. There’s even one major in environmental psychology.
Most law schools offer at least a couple of courses in environmental law. Thirty-five offer specializations. This fall semester, five hundred and forty-five students were enrolled in Vermont Law School’s Environmental Law Center. When they graduate they’ll join more than 55,000 others who identify themselves as environmental lawyers.
Public awareness of the environment, the heart of the Carson legacy, is reflected in the mushroom-like growth of non-profit environmental organizations, several of which bear her name, most of which developed (and all of which flourished) after the 1962 publication of Silent Spring. EnviroLink, an online community, lists by topic nearly three thousand environmental organizations worldwide. If your interest is population you have thirty different choices; sustainable business seventy-one; environmental economics eighty-eight; ground pollution eighty-six; and if waste management appeals to you, one of a hundred and four different organizations seeks your allegiance.
And for that we have Rachel Carson to thank. Unfortunately, she never lived to see her impact. Rachel Carson died in 1964. This May, we’ll celebrate her 100th birthday.
Ted Levin is a writer and photographer and winner of the 2004 Burroughs Medal for Nature Writing.