If you care about the environment, this one's for you.
Today in 1962, Rachel Carson's Silent Spring was published.
Named one of the greatest science books of all time, Silent Spring highlighted the damage done to nature due to excess chemical and pesticide usage.
Rachel Carson was born in an impoverished family in Pennsylvania. She didn't have a PhD and she didn't have a Y chromosome.
The odds were stacked against her as she went about her massive endeavour of telling inconvenient truths to those in power.
She spoke of how the copious usage of DDT at that time led to declining bird populations and how that in turn had a cascade effect on nature, which, if unchecked would lead to disastrous consequences for all life on earth.
Her words ring true even today, as we're faced with an unprecedented climate emergency, the likes of which will lead to disastrous consequences for all life on earth.
While that's happening, most of humanity is going:
Rachel Carson's work prompted Joni Mitchell to write this epic song (the one where they pave paradise to put up a parking lot).
"Hey farmer farmer, put away the DDT
Give me spots on my apples,
but leave me the birds and the bees.
Please!”
"The more clearly we can focus our attention on the wonders and realities of the universe about us the less taste we shall have for the destruction of our race. Wonder and humility are wholesome emotions, and they do not exist side by side with a lust for destruction."
Remember, we've only got one planet.
"That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives … on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam"
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