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Rachel Carson was a scientist and a bird watcher. She noticed, in the late '50s, the gradual disappearance of some birds, and linked it to our use of 1)pesticides. She wrote a book about her fear that 2)robins would sing no more in future spring times. She called it Silent Spring. With that revolutionary book, Rachel Carson launched the environmental movement, a force that has swept the world.
Rachel: Humans have now acquired a fateful power to 3)alter and to destroy nature. But man is a part of nature, and his war against nature is inevitably a war against himself.
Journalist: What do you think, just in an 4)overview, the effect that this woman’s work has had on this country, and the world?
Interviewee: Her work helped to produce the first Earth Day.
TV: Earth Day - we can see what we all have in common: our planet!
Interviewee: The clean water act, the clean air act, the super fund, some of these were indirect results, but all of them 5)stemmed from the new awareness that was born as a result of Silent Spring’s publication.In that century’s end, environmental challenges round the world make Carson’s words all the more timely: rain forest in danger, animal species dying up, people 6)choking on pollution, from Eastern Europe to China.
Rachel: We’re challenged, as mankind has never been challenged before, to prove our 7)maturity and our 8)mastery, not of nature, but of ourselves.
Rachel Carson died of cancer in 1964. There’s a wildlife preserve, named for her, in Maine, and her publishers still get occasional letters from people who just read Silent Spring.
