Contemporary Environmental Movement Research Articles

Chemical Fallout: Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, Radioactive Fallout, and the Environmental Movement

The landmark book Silent Spring played a vitally important role in stimulating the contemporary environmental movement. Never before or since has a book been so successful in alerting the public to a major environmental pollutant, rooting the alert in a deeply ecological perception of the issues, and promoting major public, private and governmental initiatives to correct the problem. It was exceptional in its ability to combine a grim warning about pesticide poisoning with a text that celebrated the living world. Silent Spring has been compared in its social impact to Uncle Tom's Cabin; John Kenneth Galbraith described it as one of the most important of Western literature and Robert Downs listed it as one of the books that changed America.' Rachel Carson's case against the indiscriminate use of pesticides prevailed in the face of powerful, well-financed opposition by the agricultural and chemical industries. Despite this opposition she prompted national action to regulate pesticides by mobilizing a concerned public. The book established a broad constituency for addressing the problem broader, perhaps, than that enjoyed by any previous environmental issue. Never before had so diverse a body of people, from bird watchers, to wildlife managers and public health professionals, to suburban homeowners, been joined together to deal with a common national and international environment threat. Her success in the face of what might have been overwhelming opposition suggests there was something significantly different between the response to Silent Spring in 1962 and the pesticide control efforts of the first half of the century. The issue of pesticide pollution was not new. Since the introduction of Paris green around 1867 highly toxic compounds of lead and arsenic were widely used in agriculture despite the significant health hazards they presented. As one example, 75 million lbs. of lead arsenate were applied within the U.S. in 1944; 8 million lbs. were even used in the 1961-62 crop 211

The Environmental Movement and the Left: Antagonists or Allies?

This paper examines the potential impact of the Left on the goals, issues, strategies, and constituencies of the contemporary environmental movement, Contrasting the earlier disparagement of the movement by the Left with increased Leftist attraction to the mature movement, it is argued that the Left could contribute a theoretical context for environmental issues and influence segments of the environmental movement through an emphasis on protest strategies and the differential economic impacts of environmental problems.