Bringing you the best of marine science and conservation from the last week.
Flotsam (what we’re obsessed with right now)
- More.
Jetsam (what we’re enjoying from around the web)
Weekly Salvage
Tag: rachel carson
Weekly Salvage
Flotsam (what we’re obsessed with right now)
- Ensuring that our friends and colleagues who are legal residents of the United States of America, and those suffering under oppressive regimes who heard the promise of the Mother of Exiles and chose to find a better life in our country, can still trust us with the privilege to fulfill that promise.
- Rejecting the triumph of cruelty.
- Also, these incredible thousand-year-old windmills, still in use today, milling grain in Iran.
Jetsam (what we’re enjoying from around the web)
Conservation, Popular Culture, Science
This post was originally published on Earth Day, 2009. The responses I received from it were tremendous, both positive and negative. Were I to write it again today, I would include a discussion of Carbon Offsets and Eco-Guilt.
There is a real challenge in the environmental movement. On one hand, the science is on our side, but on the other hand, there is a growing group within the movement committed to dogma and willing to sacrifice facts for pseudoscience. So, this Earth day, we once again bring you “What the hell happened to the environmental movement?”
Forty-seven years ago, a brilliant, passionate scientist who understood the power of public outreach, noticed a decline in songbird populations, discovered a trend of decreasing egg shell thickness, and correlated this effect with the increase in the use of DDT as a pesticide. After thoroughly and rigorously verifying her results and conclusions, she did something revolutionary; she wrote a book. The publication of Silent Spring in 1962 marks the beginning of the modern environmental movement in America. Its simple, elegant prose made the complex interaction between humankind and the environment accessible to a public that had limited exposure to scientific writing. Like other works of literary science, Silent Spring, wove the scientific method into a narrative; observations, questions, conflicts, discoveries, joy and sorrow. To struggle and to understand, never the last without the first. The beauty of her words still echo with that same power today.
Read More “What the hell happened to the environmental movement?” »