Quantum Windbag
Gold Member
- May 9, 2010
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If I had a time machine and the ability to change the past the birth of the environmental movement as the result of "Silent Spring" would top my list of things to fix. The movement has made almost everything worst than it would be if it never existed in the first place.
Ignore "Silent Spring"A half-century ago this summer, Rachel Carlson's Silent Spring began to appear in serialized form in The New Yorker, instilling an awareness of environmental impacts in the very fabric of our culture.
Silent Spring now affects everything we do, buy, eat and wear. It has also shaped how we think about technology in general and pesticides in particular, seeing them at best as necessary evils.
This legacy has yielded both good and bad results. The good is that Silent Spring inspired the creation of federal regulation that subjects pesticides and new technologies to strict scientific scrutiny before they can be commercialized and used.
The bad is that the demonization of agricultural technology obscures the overwhelming environmental fact of our times, that such technology — even pesticides — has been an overwhelming good for the environment and human health.
It is understandable if you had to read that last line twice. It flies in the face of what you were taught as a child, and media perceptions you've heard all of your life shaped by Silent Spring and generations of its imitators.