Tonight, your local PBS station will air a new episode of “American Experience” about the life of Rachel Carson. Check your local television listings for the time. Here on the east coast it will be airing at 8:00 pm.
I highly recommend watching this to learn more about Rachel Carson’s life, her viewpoints, and how her book Silent Spring acted as the catalyst for our current awareness of toxics, the environmental movement, and the founding of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). I’ll be watching.
In conjunction with this, the New York Times ran an article yesterday: Rachel Carson, DDR and the Fight Against Malaria. It has a 12 minute video that also is well worth watching.
This video gives a good picture of why it’s so difficult to get toxic chemicals banned. Toxic chemicals are generally in use for a reason. In the case of DDT, at first it was to kill mosquitoes that cause deadly malaria. DDT was so effective with mosquitoes, it soon became used widely. Carson documented the health and environmental effects and soon DDT was banned.
But without DDT to control disease-carrying mosquitos, malaria soon again became epidemic.
This video shows how we can think beyond using toxics for a quick-fix and come up with more lasting sustainable solutions.
