What are you Reading?

I am currently reading Silent Spring by Rachel Carson. I haven't read too far into it (school has been a bit of a distraction for me). This book has been on my must-read list for a while. And what finally inspired me to buckle down and read this book was due to the fact that it was in the running to make a list of the Ten Most Harmful Books of the 19th and 20th Centuries (2005) according to a "panel of 15 conservative scholars and public policy leaders." So, I admit it, I felt an extra bit encouragement to read it just knowing that there are some staunch conservatives out there who deem the book "harmful". It's the inner rebellious teenage U.S. citizen that made me do it (I can blame a lot of my actions on her, actually). As I understand, this book was quite controversial for its time (1962), as it opened up ideas that DDT and other synthetic pesticides might actually be harmful to our ecology and threatening to human life itself. Now days, I don't know anyone that would disagree with the points made in this book. One confirming situation involving the effects of DDT was with the diminishing population of predatory birds, and most famously, the California Condor. So I found it ironic to see it was a potential runner-up for the "harmful" books list. Clearly, Carson wrote this book with the intention of alerting society to deadly agricultural practices that were wide-spread and highly damaging to our ecosystem. So how could the information within this book have been considered harmful? Harmful, maybe, to the multi-million dollar industrial chemical industry. That's the only answer I could find to justify its candidacy. Rachel Carson was fighting a very personal battle with breast cancer while she wrote Silent Spring. She died in 1964, two years after the book was published. And so I read this book not only for mild rebellious satisfaction, but also for the simple fact that I can admire a woman like Rachel Carson for her love of nature and for the active and inspirational role she played in the environmental movement. And, as I am pursuing a career in environmental science, it would be erroneous for me to not read it.

"It is a wholesome and necessary thing for us to turn again to the earth and in the contemplation of her beauties to know the sense of wonder and humility." -Rachel Carson (1907-1964)