 First Wednesdays is sponsored by the Vermont Humanities Council and by the Kellogg Hubbard Library, with video production supported by Orca Media. Good evening. Good evening. So is this working? Yes. But you have to be pretty close to it. Okay. My directions for the night. Hi. My name is Rachel Sanichal. I'm the program and development coordinator here at the Kellogg Hubbard Library. Thank you for coming. Thank you for coming to tonight's First Wednesdays program. The First Wednesdays programs are sponsored by the Vermont Humanities Council. And tonight there are programs all over the state of Vermont, Humanities programs. People are talking about Frederick Douglass, Daily Life and Pre-War Nazi Germany, Robert Penn Warren's All the Kings Men, The Wyatt's, Making Sense of the News, Local to Global, and other topics. I want to thank Orca Media for videotaping tonight's program. And it will be on their website, orcamedia.org, I think. So you can watch it anytime. And if you know of anyone who it wasn't able to make it tonight, they will be able to see it on Orca Media. We have community feedback forms in the lobby. If you want to tell us what you like about First Wednesdays and perhaps topics that you would like us to have in the future, please fill out the form. And there's a sign-up sheet or two on a clipboard going around. You can sign up if you want. It's not mandatory. And there are two on one side. That happened. The statewide underwriters for the First Wednesdays program are the Alma Gibbs Donchin Foundation, the Wyndham Foundation, the Institute of Museum and Library Services through the Vermont Department of Libraries. The underwriter for tonight's program is Pomelo Real Estate. And tonight's speaker is Nancy J. Crumbine. She's a poet and associate professor of writing and rhetoric at Dartmouth College and a universalist Unitarian minister. She holds a PhD in philosophy and two master's degrees in philosophy and religion. She has lectured widely under the auspices of the New Hampshire and Vermont Humanities Councils, the National Council for Aging, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and religious and education conferences both in the U.S. and the U.K. In addition to her published academic articles, she's the author of Humility, Anger and Grace, Meditations Towards a Life That Matters. Please help me welcome Nancy Crumbine. Thank you, Rachel. I'm so glad to be back here. This very room, 2009, was my first Wednesday talk I ever gave. And it was the language of spiritual poets. Rachel was there, somebody there. And it was on Rumi, Kabir, Kenyon, and Dickinson. How I fit all four of those in, I don't ask. But there was a roomy enthusiast sitting in this very chair. And any time I quoted him or mentioned him, she would stand up. Rachel's left already. I was hoping she'd remember. Do you remember this? She would stood up and go, yes! So I invite you, if anything I say provokes such a response, to feel free to express yourself. I want to thank Rachel very much. The third time I've been here, I've also done E.B. White a couple of years ago. E.B. White. And I want you to put on your evaluation forms that you'd like to hear me talk on Thoreau, please. It's the sister talk to this one on Rachel Carson. So I'd love to come back to do that. I want to thank Allie White, who has made all this possible this first Wednesdays. Of course, Vermont Humanities Council, my students at Dartmouth College, Henry David Thoreau, E.B. White, and Baron, and Janet Wormser, my dear friends who are putting me up, and had to come tonight since I invited myself to stay at their house. I've given over 20 lectures of first Wednesdays over the last, since I was here. Wonderful. So on this table, a bibliography of Rachel Carson's work and also her reference URLs for things online. And I encourage you to see the American Experience documentary about her on Netflix. I believe it's still on Netflix. And the YouTube videos that I've listed, one of them is the CBS report of May 1963, which I'll be talking about more later. You can watch the entire thing, and it is worth watching the entire thing. It's really wonderful. Also, I've brought some books about her and by her. I haven't brought her collection, assuming the library has those, but I tried to bring the books that I thought you might not have access to readily. Two of those books I want to draw particular attention to. One is Always Rachel, it's called. It's by Dorothy Freeman's granddaughter. It's a collection of the essays between Dorothy and Rachel, and they were the love of their lives to each other. And the letters are so moving. I mean, it's a rare collection of letters that you can just sit there and read. And this is such a book. It's really, really beautiful. I encourage you to look at it. The other book is a book called Rachel Carson and Her Sisters, and it's about all the women scientists before and during the writing of Silent Spring and all the support that she had. It's, again, a riveting book not to be missed. Before we begin with Carson, I would just do a quick review of the times. Some of you may remember some of these things. The times leading up to this little woman from a poor, this poor polluted town outside poor polluted Pittsburgh, leading up to this shy, the times leading up to this shy, quiet woman writing a book that changed us utterly. This small, Davidic voice, which took on the Goliath chemistry, chemical industry, and the Department of Agriculture, and began, it is almost unanimously agreed, the modern environmental movement. So we should start, of course, with the wild Unitarians in Concord, Massachusetts. Thoreau, of course, more wild than Emerson, believing, as he did, that other species, including trees, had as much right to this earth as we do. Amen. Thoreau received one of the first copies of Darwin's Origin of Species, which you may know in 1859, that one of the first copies to arrive in the United States, he read it thoroughly and avidly, wrote Darwin immediately, offering his services as a scientist. Darwin, at the end of that book, calls for help in verifying his proposals, theories. That's not, neither of those words are right. But anyway, and you can see a change in Thoreau's journals once he begins doing all this research for Darwin. It becomes much more scientific, less poetic. It's a very interesting shift. Or we could begin tonight with Calvin in the 1600s in Geneva, Switzerland, that great theologian against whom Unitarian Universalists still rant. Though in this context, his theology of nature, taken up through the Presbyterian roots of Rachel's mother, Marie, Maria, is very interesting. Nature is God's creation according to Calvin. You've all read Calvin recently? To degrade it, to degrade nature in any way is the sin of pride. The sin of pride, the very sin that Carson charges. The very sin that Carson charges the scientist with, the sin of pride. Her entire life, her whole message, Carson's whole message, her whole life, is a call for humility and wonder. So Thoreau, his journals at Carson's bedside, her whole adult life. She read him every night, read from the journals every night. And so as my final reference to Unitarian Universalism, I do come by it honestly as though Carson was not a churchgoer, she did ask that her memorial service be conducted by Reverend Howlett, all souls, Unitarian Church in Washington. Let me just lay out the groundwork really just quickly. Just throw out some images for you, okay? Of the times, the heritage, the prepared ground on which she walked. Leaves of Grass, John Muir, Audubon Society, Henry Benson's The Outermost House, another favorite book of Carson's. Roger Troll Peterson's Field Guide to the Birds came out in 1934, transforming our relationship to birds and very much increasing avid birdwatching, and of course the Audubon Society. The Wilderness Society founded in 1935, and then of course the 50s and 60s. Anybody remember the 50s and 60s? Dupont, the darling of America, better things were better living through chemistry. Progress is our most important product. I was told, yes, General Electric, and I was told that Kurt Vonnegut worked for General Electric for a while and he authored that phrase. I don't believe it. But I've heard that rumor. So it is impossible to exaggerate the reverence for science and industry in particular chemistry and weapons. They were the only things that could save us from the two most fearsome enemies in the 50s. Insects and Russians. Another favorite book of Carson's was John Kenneth Galbraith's The Affluent Society published in 1958. And then the events leading up to the publication of Silent Spring. The Fire Ants Fiasco of 1957. 20 million acres sprayed with DDT by the Department of Agriculture. Quote, it reeked with the odor of decaying wildlife, killed everything in sight. And the fire ants weren't really very problematic, in fact. Then you will remember the Dutch Elm disease. I remember it well. The trucks sprang the trees down the suburbs of Shaker Heights, Ohio. And particularly in Long Island the spraying, killing everything in sight. And then Strontium 90. Remember that scare? Found in baby teeth. In the dairy supply. E.B. White writes about the fallout in the New Yorker often, in several of his essays. And then the cranberry contamination right before Thanksgiving in 1959. Another national scare of the pesticides that were allowed to be sprayed, only at a certain time and they were sprayed too late. And so the cranberries were full of pesticides. In 1957, 6,000 different synthetic pesticides were on the market with no required testing. And then there was the thalidomide horror in Europe and Canada. It was taken off the market in 1961. But you see, there's a lot of ignorance and fear going on. That leads up to the publication of this incredible book. And then of course the nuclear test in Nevada in 62. And then there was Rachel Carson, scientist, writer, hardest worker this earth has ever known, writing in severe pain all night long, racing against her own death to finish this book, Silent Spring. It was serialized in the New Yorker beginning in June of 62 and it was out by Houghton Mifflin as a book in September 62. Paul Brooks being the editor. With the message of humility, the dangers of arrogance, the necessity that we understand the balance of nature, the call for ecology which at the time was hugely controversial. Not the proper way to do biology. Her message that we are part of, not over and above, nature was new to many, many people. It was a book about DDT, but it was about something much, much more, about the control of nature. So who was this woman? And how did she do this? How did she create this paradigm shift, this scientific revolution? What I'd like to do is just go through a timeline of her life, just briefly highlight certain parts of it, and then talk a little bit about her three major works, three of her four major works, or five major work, and then open for discussion. Because of all the talks I give this, a lot of people have a lot to say on this subject. Okay, so is that sound all right, everybody? Born in 1907 in Springdale, Pennsylvania, along the Allegheny River. Her house is still available to, it's become a museum, but my friend who lives nearby said don't go. If you spend an hour in the house, your car will be covered with coal ash by the time you come out. So I still want to go, but it's... At age 11, she published her first story in this incredible magazine called St. Nicholas Magazine. It was part of the study nature movement that her mother was very involved in. It was a real back to nature movement, not back to nature, but study nature, the importance of really understanding nature that her mother very strongly believed in as a spiritual commitment and that she passed on to Rachel, who was in love with the woods and being outside, and she was much younger than her siblings, so had a lot of freedom. Third child children always have a lot of freedom, because their parents are so exhausted. But St. Nicholas... I petered out on my second, but... St. Nicholas, who else was published in the St. Nicholas Magazine? By the way, I have this leather-bound copy. It's a copy that somebody gave me of St. Nicholas Magazine, so take a look at it afterwards. E. E. Cummings, F. Scott Fitzgerald. These are all published as children. Edna St. Vincent Millay, Elizabeth Bishop, and of course, E. B. White. She was in good company. Oh, and Louisa May Alcott, and I think one of hers is in the volume that I have. So her first publication, she went to college at... Pennsylvania College for Women, which then was called Chatham College. Happened to be the first teaching job I had out of university. And there, there were two professors who were greatly influential, and since I'm one of... I'm a professor, and I like to think someday somebody will change the world because of my teaching. That was a joke. I want to name these people and give them a name. Grace Croft, her English professor. Fresh out of Radcliffe, young, dynamic. They really fell in love with each other. And of course, Rachel had always thought she would major in English. Sorry. But then she took biology with Mary Scott Skinker, and she fell in love with her as well and with biology and decided to go that route. But the English training she got from Grace Croft stayed with her. And of course, the silent spring would never have succeeded in the way that it did had she not been such a fabulous writer. She goes with Skinker's help, Professor Skinker's help. She goes to John Hopkins after Chatham and goes to Woods Hole in the summer. That was the first time she saw the ocean. She fell in love with the ocean just by reading Moby Dick. I don't know. Has anyone tried reading Moby Dick later? But she read it when she was really young and fell in love with the ocean. Interesting. That would be a fun paper, right? Think about that. But anyway, so she finally saw the ocean for the first time at Woods Hole, and it was everything she had dreamt about. There she was. So she was going to go on for a PhD, but family matters. Lack of funds during the Depression required that she get a job. And she was hired by another man who should live in history, Elmer Higgins, who hired her to do some writing. And he said, I've never seen your writing, but I'm going to take a chance. And he asked her, so this was in 35 she began, until 1951, at the Bureau of Fisheries and the Department of Commerce. And as a writer, a naturalist, able to quit in 1951 because of the money from the sea around us. But Higgins, so she writes the first pamphlet for him and gives it to him, and he goes, oh, this is a little bit much for us. You should send it to the Atlantic. And damned if she doesn't do it. And it's published. The Atlantic, as you know, was Unitarian Roots. I'm sorry, I had to bring that up. But it also has, it was the place, along with the New Yorker to publish essays. It still is. So that was her first publication, her first essay in the Atlantic. 1937. So I'm going to just skip down to, then I'm going to just jump to 1941, her first book, Under the Sea Wind. Absolutely beautiful book, but it came out five days before Pearl Harbor. So even though it had fabulous reviews, nobody was about to read about the ocean in those, in that period. So it really got lost. It was republished later, and to great acclaim, and still very much worth reading. My goal tonight, by the way, is just to get you to read Rachel Carson. Every single word is relevant, and it's just as beautiful as it was then. She became aware, she was very much aware of Pesticides early on. And in 1944, wrote The Reader's Digest, posting an article about pesticides. And of course, they wrote back and said, Oh, nobody wants to read about pesticides. And turned her down. But it kept, and of course she didn't want to write about it either. And Dorothy, once they got together in 1950, went met and became such close souls. Dorothy didn't want her to write about it either, because it's tough. Although I just have to say that Paul Brooks said of this book, of Silent Spring, she managed to make this book about death a celebration of life. How beautiful is that? It's so true. It's really true. And that's a trick. It's hard to talk about these days. It's hard to talk about anything with relationship to the environment. And make it celebratory. Okay, 1950. She gets breast cancer. Tumor is removed. And she's not told the diagnosis, because in those days, the doctor told the husband. And if he didn't have a husband, he didn't tell anyone. 1950 to 51, the manuscripts for the sea around us sold to Oxford University Press. And by this time, she had this wonderful editor, Marie, who stayed with her throughout, right to the end. More on her later. Sea Around Us was a bestseller. It off the charts, bestseller. Book of the Month Club, et cetera. The New Yorker agreed to publish it in chapters. It was very common. They still do that. And it was the first time a non-human subject was chosen for the prestigious column in the New Yorker. It's really interesting. The sales of Sea Around Us allow her to resign and work full-time as a writer. She received lots of awards, National Book Award, et cetera, for this book. In 1952, the family troubles really escalate. Her father died, had died, so then she and her mother had to, or she financially had to take care of her mother and two sisters. The sister then had Roger, her great-nephew, her nephew. No, it's a grand-nephew. The sister had two girls and then the girl had Roger. So anyway, Roger was born in 1952. She was born around him later. And she was able to buy, also from the proceeds of the book, she was able to buy her beloved property in West Southport Island in Maine off the coast of Booth Bay Harbor. She builds a cottage there called Silver Ledges. And that's where she met Dorothy Freeman, who was the next-door neighbor. And she began in 1953 to work on Edge of the Sea, her third book, and delivered some papers and more awards, more talks at women's groups, Audubon's. And then in 1957, you'll remember Sputnik. And that had a huge effect on her. She had long considered the ocean and space as sacrosanct, that human beings had messed up the earth but they couldn't mess up the ocean. There's a passage that breaks your heart. It's heartbreaking, I can't read it without crying, so I'm not going to read it to you, but I'll show it to you afterwards about how the oceans are, where the humans can't ruin the oceans and they can't ruin space. But Sputnik changed that entirely. And then the fire ants, she was very, very disturbed by the fire ants fiasco in 57 and the Dutch Elm disease. And along with the Dutch Elm disease of the spraying of just of Long Island, just sprayed Long Island, there were a number of people who were of course upset that there were dead birds writhing in their backyards. And particular people were Marjorie Spock and Mary Polly Richards, who were a couple, lesbian couple on Long Island, had a couple of acres of organic gardening and their gardens were just ruined. It was sprayed 14 times in one day. So they joined a suit along with Robert Murphy, a suit that went through all the courts and went all the way up the Supreme Court before it was thrown out on a technicality. But the research of that court, of that suit was provided to Rachel through Marjorie Spock, who is by the way the sister of Ben Spock. He was so tall. I had a privilege of meeting him and he was like so tall. The relationship of Marjorie and Mary is interesting. Nowhere is there any reference to Marjorie Spock in any of Carson's works. She had to be very, very careful once she became so famous after the sea around us she was very famous. But then especially after Silent Spring she'd be very careful because after Silent Spring the chemical industry of course was after her. They were accusing her of all sorts of bizarre things being a communist, so she had to be really careful not to be accused of being a lesbian. So she couldn't reveal these friendships and that she had to be very careful not to be considered like she was just mad because she had cancer. So she kept her cancer which came back with a vengeance in the early 60s when she was working on Silent Spring. She had to keep all that secret and she also was very supportive of animal rights and she actually did write an introduction to a book by an English friend which was published in England and this was really right at the end of her life. She did write that but that was again that was a very possibly controversial issue that she had to stay away from April 60s she had a radical mastectomy and was very, very ill throughout the writing of Silent Spring. The editor of New Yorker at the time, Wayne Sean she by the way, I forgot to say she wrote a letter to E.B. White when she was deciding that somebody really had to do something about pesticides and she asked him to write the book and he in his wisdom said I think you should write it, Rachel. Anyway, so E.B. White was still working for the New Yorker but William Sean was the chief editor at the time and said that he would publish it in serial form before Houghton Mifflin published it and it was famously it was famously immediately got incredible press President Kennedy quoted it even before it was out in in book form in August of 62 and it was just out in the New Yorker and because she was so ill and was very really unable to do most of the speaking engagement she was invited to the staff biologist at the Audubon Society, Roland Clement stepped in and did quite a lot of speaking and took a lot of the hits from hate mail and this chemical companies went after him as well. So the CBS I mentioned the CBS report that Eric Severide did it was a CBS reports remember that was a really wonderful news show Alas Eric Severide he decides to do that he wanted to do it on Silent Spring and he got Carson and then this guy from the chemical company very well spoken scientist but lucky for the environmentalist he looked horrible on film you'll see on the video he looks so ghoulish and she looks so innocent and fresh although she was dying Severide said that he was really anxious whether she would even get through the interview but she does this and so the book had sold a million copies by this time overnight 15 million people saw this show and this is the beginning of the power of television 63 April 63 and November of 63 the Mississippi River fish kill happened validating validating and giving a lot of support to the book let me just run through then Carson dies in April of 1964 age 58 and posthumously her book the sense of wonder which is really the only book she ever really really really wanted to write which is a children's book about and she felt so strongly that so take a look at this after she felt so strongly that that sense of wonder was and getting children out in nature was so very important and I just have to say that I just I love my students and they're wonderful but there are so many of them who have just simply no relationship I'm not telling you anything you don't know but it's so shocking to me just no relationship to nature whatsoever like blank and I want to give them this book maybe I'll order many copies of them let's just go through what happened after her death 1966 endangered species act 1968 the Grand Canyon dams were defeated the proposal for that the Santa Barbara oil spill 1969 also Greenpeace is organized 1970 the first Earth Day DDT is banned in 72 endangered species act 73 Love Canal 78 etc I skipped over the Wilderness Act sorry 1964 and if you've ever been to Alaska you'll know that that's the most important act that's ever passed all right that's the quick summary I want to share a little bit about these books I'm going to skip over the first one I just want to do how are we doing oh okay I have it here sorry oh no it doesn't show the time what time where are we I think I'm good I want to start with a C around us well I'll be brave I will read this I will read this paragraph man has returned to his mother's um he cannot control or change the ocean as in his brief tendency on earth he has subdued and plundered the continents in the artificial world of his cities and towns he often forgets the true nature of his planet and the long vistas of his history in which the existence of the race of men has occupied a mere moment of time the sense of all these things comes to him most clearly in the course of a long ocean voyage when he watches day after day the receding rim of the horizon ridged and furrowed by waves when at night he becomes aware of the earth's rotation as the stars pass overhead or when alone in this world of water and sky he feels the loneliness of this earth in space and then as never on land the truth that his world is a water world a planet dominated by its covering mantle of ocean in which the continents are but transient intrusions of land above the surface of all encircling sea um and she goes on to say how he can't at least he can't ruin the ocean ah she was given the national book award in 1952 for this book the sea around us how many of you have read it recently or read it at all yeah long time ago read it again ah I'd like you to read from her speech in accepting the national book award this was in 1952 and just enjoy her use of language it's just I feel like Carson like I do about E.B. White they're just this it's really just best to read them not talk about them many people have commented with surprise on the fact that a work of science should have a large popular sale because sound spring is a work of science for sure but this notion that science is something that belongs in a separate compartment of its own apart from everyday life is one that I should like to challenge we live in a scientific age yet we assume that knowledge of science is the prerogative of only a small number of human beings isolated and priest like in their laboratories this is not true the materials of science are the materials of life itself science is part of the reality of living it is the what the how and the why of everything in our experience it is impossible to understand man without understanding his environment and the forces that have molded him physically and mentally the aim of science is to discover and illuminate truth and to take it is the aim of literature whether biography or history or fiction it seems to me then that there can be no separation no separate literature of science my own guiding purpose was to portray the subject of my sea profile with fidelity and understanding all else was secondary I did not stop to consider whether I was doing it scientifically or poetically I am writing as the subject demanded the winds the sea and the moving tides are what they are if there is wonder and beauty and majesty in them science will discover these qualities if they are not there science cannot create them if there is poetry in my book about the sea it is not because I deliberately put it there but because no one could write truthfully about the sea and leave out the poetry we have looked first at man with his vanities and greed and his problems of a day or a year and then only and from this biased point of view we have looked outward at the earth he has inhabited let me just make this clear so it is a new paragraph we have looked first at man with his vanities and greed and his problems of the day then and only then from this biased point of view of me in the center we have looked outward at the earth he has inhabited so briefly and at the universe in which our earth is so minute apart yet these are the great realities and against them we see our human problems in different perspective perhaps if we reverse the telescope and looked at man down these long vistas we should find less time and inclination to plan for our own destruction the edge of the sea her third book on the ocean in the preface gives such a definition of ecology I wanted to read it to you to understand the shore it is not enough to catalog its life understanding comes only when standing on a beach we can sense the long rhythms of earth and sea that sculptured its land forms and produced the rock and sand of which it is composed when we can sense with the eye and ear of the mind the surge of life beating always at its shores blindly, inexorably pressing for a foothold to understand the life of the shore it is not enough to pick up an empty shell and say this is a murex or that is an angel wing true understanding demands intuitive comprehension of the whole life of the creature once inhabited this empty shell how it survived amid surf and storms what were its enemies how it found food and reproduced its kind what were its relations to the particular sea world in which it lived she also in this book writes about the oceans getting warmer this is what did I say 56 she writes about climate change we've known this for years folks all right silent spring she's as I've said she's been troubled by this the DDT issues for a long time but she gets a letter sent to her by Olga Huckins January 1958 it was a letter she sent to the Boston Herald about the mass poisoning on Long Island and it was this letter that tradition at least has has it as the the the final push that got her to decide to do this book and begin this research in May of 58 Paul Brooks of Houghton Mifflin and William Sean New Yorker supported it only Dorothy was very worried about it as I've said Rachel writing a book about death and they both knew that the industry would go after her the chemical industry would go after never mind the Department of Agriculture the Gods of profit and production quote unquote the dedication you've all read silent spring in the last year so there's a dedication it's very short and then there are two quotes I'm going to read those two so to Albert Schweitzer who said quote man has lost the capacity to foresee and to forestall he will end by destroying the earth and then a quote from Keats the sedge is withered from the lake and no birds sing and E.B. White I am pessimistic about the human race because it is too in sorry because it is too in gen blanking out have you pronounced I'm sorry just I guess I don't have my reading glass on yet I'm pessimistic about the human race because it is too ingenuous for its own good our approach to nature is to beat it into submission we would stand a better chance of survival if we accommodated ourselves to this planet and viewed it appreciatively instead of skeptically and dictatorially and that's how this book begins how many of you have read silent spring okay how many of you have not you have no idea what I'm talking about so I want to say a few words and then you remember how it starts well some of you haven't read it so it starts with a fable and this is Marie Rodel the editor it starts with a fable so it has this prophetic tone right from the beginning there was once a town in America where all life seemed to live in harmony with its surroundings and then she goes on to describe this idyllic town it's so beautiful a couple of paragraphs then she says then a strange blight crept over the area and everything began to change some evil spell had settled on the community mysterious maladies swept the flocks of chickens the cattle and sheep sickened and died everywhere was a shadow of death and she goes on in a very specific detail there was a strange stillness the birds for example where had they gone and then the final paragraph of the opening this town does not actually exist but it might easily have a thousand counterparts in America or elsewhere in the world I know of no community that has experienced all the misfortunes I describe yet every one of these disasters has actually happened somewhere and many real communities have already suffered a number of them a grim specter has crept upon us almost unnoticed and this imagined tragedy may easily become a stark reality we all shall know what has already silenced the voices of spring in countless towns in America this book is an attempt to explain and then it goes on to be this incredible science book that I can read and I can't read science she has the gift that she was able to translate scientific studies and scientific examples to an audience that could understand them and in fact she was writing mostly to women, to housewives a little bit more well let me just jump into that the style there are books, articles books so much written about her style in this book but one this is from Alex MacGillivay in a book called Manifesto, Rachel Carson's Silent Spring he writes about her style and as much has been made about her alliteration or metaphors etc but I thought this was pretty particularly interesting one stylistic feature of the book deserves mention again and again, Carson juxtaposes ordinary housewives with men of science and business in her stories because she retells the story of the fire ants the housewives speak at length individually in simple words and are identified by hometown or name by contrast the quote control men the cattle men, the sports men the chemical salesmen the town fathers and the federal field men are gray, faceless, unquoted and nameless the repeated use of this device counter pointing the personal with the impersonal housewives with male technocrats is one of the most mesmerizing features of the book drawing in individual readers I tell my students all the time that writing is not a solitary business every book takes a village and it's so true in Rachel Carson's case one of the reasons she was able to write this incredible book is that she had this network of friends scientific scientists friends who fed her the material center studies helped proofread and double check and check again this vast network of people that were invested in this book in addition they had the women particularly in particular women's scientists who were very supportive of her and doing what they could for her and she had her group of female friends especially Dorothy Freeman but also Shirley Briggs Jean Davis who was her research secretary I've mentioned Marie Rodel the agent and of course Paul Brooks was amazing mainstay for her throughout and ended up adopting Roger at age 10 when Rachel Carson died pretty amazing man and wrote a beautiful beautiful biography of her Margaret Mead famously said never doubt a small group of thoughtful committed citizens can change the world indeed it's the only thing that ever has and so it is with with Carson you know about Rosa Parks and the bus you know the lot has been written about that too that no way the bus book I would have haven't if Rosa Parks hadn't been connected with a million people in that city through her church groups through all these connections it's the same there's a very nice parallel between Rosa Parks and Rachel Carson in this regard the book is a call to action it's not just a science book she is very much asking for a response for us to do something and she goes through all these horrors and at the end she makes suggestions and she's very clear she's not saying to ban DDT 100% she's not saying stop all pesticides overnight which is what the chemical company said she was saying and then they produced all this fake science suggesting what would happen if we ended to represent it as you can imagine over and over again but the last chapter is her suggestions of what to do but then she takes this final swipe at these guys the chemical industry and I'm going to read you that at the end I'll read it to you right now how are we doing? Do we have a time? Good I can't tell you how readable this book is you won't be able to put it down and it's again it is a celebration of life it's just beautiful that way so as I say she brings you up back up at the end with suggestions it is possible to make this change and dig ourselves out of this mess but then she has to come back and get this one last punch and so this is the last two paragraphs of the book through all these new imaginative and creative approaches to the problem of sharing our earth with other creatures so sharing the earth with other creatures I have to say is still a radical idea at least to my students when I suggest that it might be speciesist for them to think that human for them to think that human beings are superior to other animals than other animals they don't know what I'm talking about I mean I don't expect they don't have to agree but they don't even know what I'm talking about the idea of sharing the earth with other creatures through all these new imaginative and creative approaches to the problem of sharing our earth with other creatures there runs a constant theme the awareness that we are dealing with life with living populations and all their pressures their surges and recessions only by taking account of such life forces and by cautiously seeking to guide them into channels favorable to ourselves can we hope to achieve a reasonable accommodation between the insect hordes and ourselves the current vogue for poisons has failed utterly to take into account these most fundamental considerations and here she goes as crude a weapon as the caveman's club the chemical barrage has been hurled against the fabric of life how beautiful is that as crude a weapon as the caveman's club the chemical barrage has been hurled against the fabric of life a fabric on the one hand delicate and destructible on the other miraculously tough and resilient and capable of striking back in many ways these extraordinary capacities of life have been ignored by the practitioners of chemical control who have brought to their tasks no high-minded orientation no humility before the vast forces with which they tamper the control of nature quote-unquote which by the way the scientist on the CBS thing that's debating her he's openly advocating that's what science does control nature and that's what we're supposed to do that's our destiny as human being she writes the control of nature is a phrase conceived in arrogance born of the neanderthal age of biology and philosophy when it was supposed that nature exists for the convenience of man the concepts and practices of applied entomology for the most part date from that stone age of science it is our alarming misfortune that so primitive as science has armed itself with the most modern and terrible weapons and that in turning them against the insects it has also turned them against the earth and I'll close with a personal this is just a small short paragraph from my journal which I wrote in the midst of preparing for this evening the verge of tears always even thinking about her her delicate features her little body, bright clear eyes all of which I know only from reading about her, staring at photos of her imagining her working through the night every night until she could not she seems so delicate so elfin and yet out of this fragile dying woman comes this book comes this stand against capitalism arrogance in defense of nature whom few understood to even need defense at the time out of this frail body comes voice a condemnation of silence not only the silence of no birds but the silence of those who do not speak truth to power who do not speak for those on this planet who cannot speak the silence of complicity and with that I will open it for questions and discussion yes sir she's a remarkable wonderful voice she didn't win there are still the chemical companies there's still the department of agriculture there's still something called the environmental protection agency which has been totally captured by those others bird populations are declining now whenever insect populations are disappearing one of the most widely used insecticides for crops is a neonicotinoid which is a systemic poison which turns entire planted poison leaf, stem, sap root all poison so she's a wonderful voice she set us on the right course but it's not over no but well who said it was yeah I had a I had a I wrote a let me just read you something that I was going to oh maybe I don't have it I just want to add something which I think this is the right group to tell this to Vermont licenses the sale of 640 some neonicotinoids to homeowners which could potentially be in sale for sale in any garden store or hardware store we are in the process of trying to look at laws that would reduce or eliminate the sale of those items to homeowners who tend to think more is better and don't lose them so there we are living in the darkest times that in my many years certainly but I want to what I wrote about earlier and I can't find what I wrote it's fine but is that birds were literally birds were dying things look pretty bleep then and if you really be white on some of this the fallout issues etc so yes they only gotten worse and of course in the last two years it's been beyond belief and there are biologists who say this the game is over so let's just take the worst possible scenario that the game is over then so the analogy I think of is ok my mother is dying now what do I do I guess I'll just leave town or she's going to die you don't do that right you give her your best shot you get best energy every last day is the best possible we have to look at the reality and then we have to look at people that inspire us and one of the reasons that I like giving this talk and we'll give it whenever I'm asked and I've given it in different venues on the first Wednesday is that Carson's courage she's dying of cancer she's in horrible pain all the time she's being hounded and crucified by the chemistry industry she stands up and speaks before the senate committee Rivcoff's I can't pronounce anything tonight Rivcoff's senate committee hearing on pesticides she does a CVS report she gives the talks that she can in utter pain and commitment to her vision and she felt that she was the only one that could do this book she really felt that she knew that she had the fame, she had the ability of the writing ability she had the connections to pull all this science together to make a difference we just have to each find our niche what we can do and to do it and to pull each other up when the news gets us down I was talking to Baron Janet tonight about this summer I went to my cabin in Canada and I was so addicted to the horrible news I ended up ruining my three weeks of isolation in my cabin because I couldn't turn the friggin radio off but when I got to England for a month I got off the plane I said to my British friends I don't want to hear any news I'm in a total blackout unless it's really good news and they knew what that meant so it is important it really is important to figure out each of us individually individually for each one how to know what's going on to be informed and to figure out where your fight is where the front line is for you and to keep the fight going miracles happen we have bald eagles without this book we would not have bald eagles we wouldn't have robins we just talked about taking a break I think we all need to know that we can't solve it on our own we do burn out we need to know when to take that break re-energize and come back absolutely absolutely years ago I saw a friend the sanitation workers in Boston helping them with strikes organizing and I said don't you get depressed and she looked at me like I was crazy she said why would I get depressed I'm doing something you would get depressed when we're not fighting there's a wonderful you know Rebecca Solnath's work she has this great hope in the dark it's a must read it's a must read if I get the new director I'll have to work on her but she's contemporaries she talks about resistance and it's important to not just look at the march in Washington and what the hell did that produce but to see it in a long line of resistance Philip Halley the great philosopher who wrote the little town in southern France that saved 4,000 plus Jews during the war he talks about how we're in this eye of a hurricane that's what life is and there's this destructive forces coming at us all the time we're a little flugelow little birds flying in the center and our job is to just keep pushing back the darkness the hurricane keep pushing it back but God knows there have been days where I couldn't say any of that I just curled up in the corner I just wanted to say thank you first of all I think it's page 23 we have the book right there some other folks have touched on it already Rachel Carson brilliantly highlighted our I think she even calls it our academic cyber mindset and how it is those still exist and that networking that she highlighted was so important for her I'll give you a quick example 2016 five year cancer plan what can cause cancer for you in Vermont two things sunshine and radon pesticides, no mention and I bring this up to people at our state university but I don't respect anybody but I get told I lived in an alternative reality so hold that thought when you mentioned the pollinator protection committee about doing their work and how they only wanted to address Neonicotinoids which was already mentioned I ask in a formal meeting how come we're not including glyphosate which has these effects and how come we're not including atrazine which has these effects my question was not answered which is fine, the committee went on why are we not looking at cumulative effects appears nowhere in the notes it's like the question was never posed so last year when I went to the Senate AG committee I told Senator Starr in his committee you aren't going to find out about this question because it's not in the writing but I'm going to read it to you twice here so you hear it twice but that's an example of no comprehension of cross pollinating between academic areas or whatnot but it just blew my mind that the question wouldn't make it into the notes yeah, wow then another powerful book people might want to know about is Hal O'Reilly's book The War of Beyond the War on the Mesa Species she hammers on the idea of restoration as we talk about feeding overly hugress and pride and subjugating nature to our wishes restoration as I arbitrary and backwards looking at it to find out the clock and bring nature back to some previous condition I don't know, 1491 or whatnot but I just had a conversation this afternoon a fellow wants to restore a flow plane for us and I said, you know, I've been telling you for six years restoration is a meaningless word you need to acknowledge that the landscape is damaged and depleted could we perhaps rehabilitate it instead of playing this game of restoration so this isn't what you're talking about it does remind me of E.O. Wilson if any of you read his new book on half the earth I think it's called Half Earth he's calling for a rewilding of half the earth the only way we're going to survive if we return, that's not restoration I know, but return half the earth to wilderness and everybody goes oh, that's ridiculous, it's not possible he claims it is of course, just heard today the population in 2050 the world population is almost 7 billion we're at almost 7 billion now the human population has doubled in my lifetime that's not happening really well, yeah thank you for that it really is the sugar industry the oil industry the tobacco industry all hired research scientists all messed with the stuff to tell us the climate it just goes on and on the horrors of it and what's so inspiring about Carson, she got the connection between the industry and the government and some of the academy she got it and she got more and more radical out against it as she went on her last, one of her last speeches was to the women's press club well, let's, I don't want to interrupt this is another great quote well, Rachel Carson also spoke about the resiliency and I just I know in Canada when I've been up there they have these interpretation centers and one of them that I went to they had the foresight to show over millions, billions of years the coming together and the going part of the continent and it was like the earth was breathing yeah and we're here for such a short period of time and we really don't know what's going to happen so, but nature is resilient and they don't wear the current you see in a turkey it's not wearing the current fad it's timeless they pretty much look the same now as they did 200, 400 years ago it's a wonderful thing to me to see that they're kind of adapting to the world as it is at this time and in the future I think this is our own history my perception is we could go down they could go down with us but they may come back it will be different but it's energy and you can't just end energy it's going to be expressed in some way and we don't know what that is so it's a mystery and I tend to be more hopeful about it than that and I think Rachel Carson is too it may be an end of a way of this energy being expressed it could come back and be something else it doesn't have to be an end because we have the power to annihilate nature and it never come back again I don't know how to talk about so globally but she certainly wanted pesticides to stop killing birds speaking of nature centers up in Alaska a couple years ago well four years ago in the national parks and the glaciers and they show how it's receded and so the narrator the young guide what are they called? do this whole talk about how they're receding now no mention of climate change not a word I say something and she sort of evades and then but there's the solar crowd and so they all go and then I go up to her trying to be polite what's going on and she said we have been attacked so often by people in these groups that how dare you say that it's not mad men and these are young kids they're early 20's she said we just have we've just given up we just have to be so careful what we say I mean that really got me this is a federal government not telling the truth about silence by mob rule really what time is it? I have to stop at 8.30 because you turned into pumpkins 8.15 8.15 okay any other questions? we can stop earlier too but I actually have a I occasionally look at some of the reports on climate change which are really great big committees I look at them and why don't somebody wrote that decently no kidding I have not had a chance to read the latest report that just came out last week or so has anyone read it? yeah it's true we need another Rachel Carson forever telling my students you're going to be the next Rachel Carson it's so important it really matters how things are written it really matters words matter yeah back there during a talk you talked about how she was ill when she was writing the book and in her quotes in the beginning of the book they were very pessimistic the world is going to end her world is going to end do you want to talk to maybe the metaphor of her passing and her life ending and her seeing the possible world passing so those yeah that's a really great question the quotes are pessimistic but the book is not that initial thing is to try to wait the audience up to this is a real danger if we don't do something Anne's very high note that there are many things we can do and she lays them out scientifically what can be done other than mass spraying and then ends on this high note the chemical companies one of the reasons I said earlier that she didn't want anyone to know she had cancer well first of all they didn't talk about cancer in those days and you didn't tell people but she also was very very worried that it would be used against her and so the chemical companies might go there but I don't want to she I mean she I think she was I think she was definitely optimistic I mean that the book would have make a difference and it did it made a huge difference we're in a horrible backlash right now I mean there are no words for where we are right now it's beyond what we could have ever even imagined but we need to persist and yet she persisted yes it's not a really question there's an excellent article in New York Times about the Armageddon of Insects and it's sort of a statement of what's going on right now which is what I would again refer to apocalypse I think so loss of insects yeah yeah I'd like to see I don't know if I missed it other thoughts or questions yeah I wanted to just echo what Nona had said about the degree of and number of pesticides in our state of Vermont and and also to the fellow who said but it's all being used and you've said about Rachel Carson that her book awakened the public it was a best seller and to be really hopeful and echo what everybody else has said I think she's cheering us on she was successful in saving a lot of birds making people up to the danger and even though the pendulum has swung back I think maybe it's swinging back the other way and so we have an opportunity here in Vermont because there are so many of us that are paying attention if we focus in our own state and echo the excellent work that we're hearing like the apocalypse of insects and banning the use of glyphosate and atrazine and neonicano neonix so and just like on a positive note I have to say so two years ago we started hearing about how monarchs were endangered this past summer I saw so many monarch butterflies and chrysalises and such an increase so that when we do pay attention and we do speak out and we do take action like you said in our own little realm it makes a difference the other thing to remember is again this is obvious but when things aren't happening on the federal level they are happening in certain states and they're happening locally and I have to tell you that a film that you must see Rachel you must bring it to the library oh she's left is this film called tomorrow did anyone see it it was at the hop so it's this young these three or four young french couple and they read this article in 2012 about the end of the world scientific america and they go oh my god the earth won't be here for our grandchildren we have to do something so they grab a camera and they go around the world looking for where people are doing positive things and this film is so joyful it takes you to San Francisco the waste treatment plan they have which is amazing it goes to Copenhagen and the bike pass it goes to this little town in northern england called toberden where a group of women are sitting around one day in despair saying we've got to do something and they went to the town officials and they said we'd like all the vegetables I was in england a week after I saw this movie visiting my naturalist friend and said where is this town she goes 40 minutes away I said we're going tomorrow so we went and sure enough this town every square inch is full there is no building is vegetables and there are people picking people are working in them there is a sign that says help yourself they're organic say that yes it's all organic and of course the unitarian church is behind it what was the name of the book you mentioned Hope in the Dark Rebecca Solnit she's all over she's written tons of books I couldn't put this down I came to my book group and they didn't like it but that's their problem because it's a really great if you're an actor if you have any interesting change in the world I think it's a great book it's really and it's very hopeful I think it was called the follow up to the Silent Spring it's very difficult to read crazy hard compared to the Silent Spring as Theo Colburn wrote or Stolen Future crazy hard to read but they talked about fish being gender confused in England in the 80s and we just saw that here in 2016 and thought it was the first time it ever happened on the planet but I just wanted to echo examples Renee's thought on we need more role models definitely and they're out there the young people don't know where to look and people tell me all the time what I do on the land is not peer-reviewed by PhDs and so forth and I say well I haven't seen you out in those 15 years so the PhDs need to get out of the towers to be perfectly honest but King Arthur Flowers doing brilliant work as an example I can name 20 towns in Vermont so it's local grass roots that are and we don't hear about them and if we could hear about them our spirits would be lifted and then the CEO or whatever his title is at Gardner Supply I asked him I said we're trying to save a lake here tell me you're not selling Scott's Roundup Ready grassy but no way we're not selling anything produced by that company and Vice Farming Yard does not sell whatever product I always check them every year I don't say good things about it you can tell people shop there but you make sure you're not carrying it I think this is a fabulous example of what we all need to be doing we need to always be asking asking asking shops what they're doing where their lines are and really putting pressure any thoughts back to Rachel? yeah I think one of the biggest misconceptions is that organic farming isn't efficient and it produces three times the amount of food per acre as other commercial farming it's just commercial farming is about minimizing labor and we don't have a problem with labor in this world we have plenty of labor people enjoying working on farms and producing food that way but we make it a terrible choice with capitalism to grow food in a very destructive way that's a good point amen yeah there's the whole issue of food the whole issue of capitalism yes I get in a lot of trouble doing that I think the point with Rachel Carson and her effect on all of us is that you need to step back and look at the big picture sometimes we get caught in our little micro worlds and don't see the big picture and the consequences of that larger world that we need to work on so if you, yes I was just another thought of saying articles that were significant if you want a different perspective on hope Derek Jensen's Beyond Hope is really interesting and it's really it's just a different a little bit of a different perspective so I'm going to end with another upbeat thing and I'm just going to take the speaker's privilege to give this little advertisement my oldest son, Jacob Crumbine works for Impossible Foods it's a start-up in San Francisco that is making plant-based meat and it is available the Impossible Burger is available now in the Norwich Inn and at the Hop on Dartmouth campus and if you call me or email me I will take you personally out to lunch and where? oh here in Montpelier great so again I'm saying this but the point is there are a lot of things happening and Jacob tells me about this a lot of things happening with these start-up companies that are coming up with really important things the Impossible Burger is for meat lovers it's not for vegans it's for people who can't give up meat but they know it's horrible for beef especially it's horrible for the plant and horrible for your body just like me the point is that this is just one little example of things that are happening that can help keep you void up maybe somebody could come up with a way to make food out of ticks