Silent Spring is a classsic environmental book, but it was also the first popular book to write about the toxic effects of pesticides to human health. Today I have two guests who have studied Carson’s life, to tell us more about her life and works, and how she contributed to our modern awareness of toxics.
Rachel Carson is one of my inspirations and heros, because she stood up for our rights to live in a toxic-free world when nobody else was talking about it. So today I want to honor her.
Linda Lear PhD is the author of the acclaimed biography of Rachel Carson, Rachel Carson: Witness for Nature, and numerous articles on Carson. Lear’s biography of Carson was awarded the prize for the best book on women in science by the History of Science Society and has been translated into eight languages. www.rachelcarson.org
Patricia DeMarco PhD has been a Rachel Carson scholar since 2005, with service as the Executive Director of the Rachel Carson Homestead Association and as the Director of the Rachel Carson Institute at Chatham University. She writes and speaks extensively on the environmental ethic of Rachel Carson and her relevance to modern times. She is currently writing a book titled “Pathways to Our Sustainable Future.”
TOXIC FREE TALK RADIO
Honoring Rachel Carson—the First Author to Write About Toxics—for Earth Day
Host: Debra Lynn Dadd
Guest:Linda Lear PhD & Patricia DeMarco PhD
Date of Broadcast: April 22, 2014
DEBRA: Hi, I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. This is Toxic Free Talk Radio where we talk about how to thrive in a toxic world and live toxic-free.
Today is Earth Day, April 22, 2014. I’m here in Clearwater, Florida. And we’re going to celebrate Earth Day today by celebrating Rachel Carson.
Now, some of you may know her as the author of Silent Spring. You may recognize the name of that book and not know who wrote it. But Silent Spring is one of the most important environmental books ever written, and it also was the first book to talk about toxics, and how they affected the environment, and how they affect human health.
I want to just read you a little paragraph. This is from the Earth Day website at EarthDay.org. This is about the history of Earth Day.
It says, “At that time, Americans were slurping leaded gas through massive V8 sedans.”
This is April 22, 1970.
“Industry belched out smoke and sludge with little fear of legal consequences or bad press. Air pollution was commonly accepted as the smell of prosperity. Environment was a word that appeared more often in spelling bees than on the evening news.”
“Although mainstream America remained oblivious to environmental concerns, the stage had been set for change by the publication of Rachel Carson’s New York Times bestseller, Silent Spring, in 1962.”
So the first Earth Day was eight years after Silent Spring was published in 1962.
“The book represented a watershed moment for the modern environmental movement, selling more than 500,000 copies in 24 countries. And up until that moment, more than any other person, Ms. Carson raised public awareness of concern for living organism, the environment and public health.”
Now, we’re going to celebrate her today and learn about her. I have two guests. The first is her biographer, Linda Lear, who wrote Rachel Carson: Witness for Nature. And my second guest, which will be on the second half of the show is Patricia DeMarco who is the former head of the Rachel Carson Institute. And she, herself, is writing a book about toxic chemicals and the environment.
So let’s first talk to Rachel Carson’s biographer, Linda Lear.
Hi, Linda.
LINDA LEAR: Hi. Nice to be on your show. Thank you.
DEBRA: Thank you for being here.
Before we talk, I just would like to read the opening paragraph from Silent Spring.
“For the first time in the history of the world, every human being is now subjected to contact with dangerous chemicals.”
Remember, this is 1962.
“…from the moment of conception until death. In the less than two decades of their youth, the synthetic pesticides have been so thoroughly distributed throughout the animate and inanimate world that they occur virtually everywhere.”
They already knew that. She knew this in 1962. And everyone in the world who read this book knew this.
“They have been recovered from most of the major river systems and even from streams of groundwater flowing unseen through the earth.”
“Residues of these chemicals linger in soil to which they may have been applied a dozen years before. They have entered and lodged in the bodies of fish, birds, reptiles and domestic and wild animals, so universally that scientists carrying on animal experiments find it almost impossible to locate subjects free from such contamination.”
“They have been found in fish in remote mountain lakes, in earthworms burrowing in soil, in the eggs of birds and in man himself for these chemicals are now stored in the bodies of the vast majority of human beings regardless of age.”
“They occur in mother’s milk and probably in the tissues of the unborn child.”
And we now have had studies done which show that that actually is true. They are in the tissues of the unborn child.
So Linda, tell us about this woman who wrote this book.
LINDA LEAR: Well, Rachel Carson, I always want to say, knew that she had some special mission in her life. She was a quiet, retiring person. She never intended to be an alarmist or a revolutionary (although I think she became something of a revolutionary in her lifetime).
But Silent Spring was not a book she started out wanting to write. She was almost dragged into writing it because she was so alarmed by what she was discovering, and nobody else would take up battle.
We have to remember that in 1962, chemistry was god, and chemists in their white coats in laboratories were god-like. We just come from a time of war. Science was king. And science was mostly male.
Rachel Carson did not have a Ph.D. She was a writer. She had made herself famous through writing The Biography of the Sea, three books on the ocean.
And so she came to Silent Spring not as a scientific expert, but as someone who had observed, and read, and studied, and was alarmed by what she found out.
DEBRA: And also what was going on at that time was that, every night, people were watching television and seeing commercials about better living through chemistry. I remember that. I was seven years old when this book was published.
And that’s what we were watching on TV—that and the Jetsons. I remember the Jetsons cartoons about what it would be like in the future to have video phones like we have nowadays. I never thought that would ever happen, but here we are.
LINDA LEAR: Here we are.
DEBRA: Yes. Tell us something about her background.
LINDA LEAR: She came from Springdale, Pennsylvania, which is a little town on the Allegheny River.
When she was a young girl, it was a pristine town.
She and her family were not very well-to-do. They scrabbled. Her mother taught piano lessons. Her father worked in several jobs, mostly unrewarded. And thus, Rachel was always interested in writing and in nature. Her mother was her best teacher. She loved her birds and identified animals.
She graduated from high school in Parnassus. And at just about that point, in 1924/25, Springdale was beginning to be as polluted upstream as Pittsburgh was downstream. Springdale is about 10-miles from downtown Pittsburgh. And so Rachel witnessed the sullying, if you will, of her beautiful, little pristine village on the Allegheny River.
The water turned musty and began to smell. There were big chemical companies […] right in her neighborhood. There was foot and cement dust all over the little homes. And she witnessed this. She witnessed this deterioration of the environment.
So when she went to, what is now Chatham University, she went there with an already built-in sensitivity to the environment and to what was happening to the natural world around her. And she had already published stories in various children’s magazines. She wanted to be a writer.
She started out majoring in English. And at that time, there weren’t very many women scientists, and it was the beginning of the Great Depression. She graduated in 1929, and there were no jobs for women in science.
But Rachel discovered that what she saw through the microscope in her biology class meant more to her than what she was trying to do by writing fiction or even non-fiction.
So, she changed her major in college to Biology thanks to a wonderful mentor. And then she went onto Woods Hole and did graduate work at Johns Hopkins in Biology, and got an M.A. in Zoology, all the while interested in the natural
world.
DEBRA: Tell us about that moment. What led to the story behind why it was called Silent Spring?
LINDA LEAR: That’s a good question. The title of the book was under a lot of debate between her editor, her agent and herself. At one point, the title was Man Against Nature. But what Carson was finding out was that humans were actually the biggest culprit of environmental toxicity and environmental damage. It’s not a popular idea then, and it’s not a popular idea in some corners now.
DEBRA: I need to interrupt you because we need to go to break, but we’ll continue just as soon as we come back.
You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. And today, we’re celebrating Rachel Carson with her biographer, Linda Lear. And then we’ll have another guest talking about Rachel when we come back.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. It’s Earth Day, and we’re celebrating Rachel Carson. And we’re talking with her biographer, Linda Lear, who wrote Rachel Carson: Witness for Nature.
So you were telling us how the title came to be.
LINDA LEAR: Well, the title came about because, finally, in her research, she had heard about so many towns and villages across the country where pesticides were being used, and suddenly, birds were dying, bees were dying, cattle were dying, domestic pets were sick and even children were sick.
And so they were talking about the fact that there was a possibility that spring might become silent. And that’s really the metaphor for how she got Silent Spring. But it’s not the fact that there was a specific town where all those things that happened. But in her research, all those towns had something that happened.
And can I just say that in 1962, the American public really did not understand that pesticides were poison. They really thought that pesticides and toxic chemicals couldn’t get through the barrier of the skin.
In the Uses of Pesticide report that the Congress, the President’s Special Committee on Pesticides, wrote just before Rachel’s book came out, the last line of that report says, “The American public does not understand that pesticides are poison.” That just really threw me when I first read that.
DEBRA: I think still people don’t understand that pesticides are poison or that toxic chemicals can get to your skin.
LINDA LEAR: I think that’s right. So Rachel went about trying to make people understand that the skin was not a barrier, that breathing was not a barrier, that putting your mask over your face is not sufficient, that chemicals are in your food, in your drinking water—what scientists and Rachel would call “persistent” in the water, in the soil.
Once DDT is in the soil, in the water, in your tissues, it doesn’t go away.
DEBRA: That’s right. It stays.
I know that you’re only available for the first half of the show. And I just want to mention before we get there in a couple of minutes—it goes by so fast, I know—how wonderful you are as a biographer. I actually haven’t read Rachel Carson, but the way that I found Linda Lear was by reading her book about Beatrix Potter: A Life in Nature.
This is a very thick book. It’s about two-inches thick. I started reading it, and I couldn’t put it down. And you sometimes think that biographies are going to be dry and difficult to get through, but this was not at all. I was fascinated. I couldn’t stop reading this book.
I do want to mention, Beatrix Potter, she has nothing to do with toxics. It wasn’t a problem at that time. Do you mind if I tell the story, Linda?
LINDA LEAR: No. Please, go ahead.
DEBRA: You told it so well. You inspired this.
LINDA LEAR: I appreciate the enthusiasm.
DEBRA: If I were doing a show in Beatrix Potter, I would call it, How Peter Rabbit Saved the Lake Country, because she so loved nature. She so loved nature. Linda and I talked earlier before the show about what a scientist she was.
And not only did she write Peter Rabbit and draw all those beautify pictures, but she also used her artistic talents to preserve information about local flora there in the English countryside.
But what a lot of people don’t know (and it’s in Linda’s book) is that in her later years, she took all this money that she made from writing Peter Rabbit books, and how they were so loved by so many children. And the money that she made writing those books, she used to buy the Lake Country of the English countryside, the whole thing.
She just bought farm after farm after farm because at that time, it was all being threatened. She said, “No.” And she bought it. And that’s why we have the Lake Country.
And every time I think about that, I want to cry because I’m so moved that one person like Rachel Carson, one woman, wrote a book and alerted the world about toxic chemicals. One woman just bought up the whole countryside because she had the money to do it, and she knew it needed to be preserved.
LINDA LEAR: And she cared.
DEBRA: And she cared. You’ve picked two incredible women to write about.
LINDA LEAR: Well, I think there are a lot of Beatrix and Rachel that are actually quite similar even though they lived almost half-a-century apart. Carson was born in 1907, and Beatrix Potter was born in 1866 and very Victorian.
But in their attitude towards nature, they were very, very similar. They both approached nature scientifically. Potter had animal pets as a child. And when they died, she and her little brother would boil their bones, and articulate their skeletons, so to be able to better draw them even more lifelike and to understand how the bodies work.
Carson went out and wrote about birds’ nests as a child and won prizes in literary magazines.
So they were both women whose great talent was in observation and imagination. Potter’s imagination is clearly more visible in her little book stories, but Carson’s imagination enabled her to write her first book about what it must be like to live under the sea. The book was called Under the Sea Wind. It’s a very special book. And it follows three animals who dwell over and under the sea, what their lives, she imagined, are like. And it’s not as she imagined it, but as she studied and observed.
So both of them have imagination. Both of them have this incredible ability to observe, and then to write about it.
DEBRA: Yes, I’ve noticed that with both of them as well. They’re exceptional women, both of them.
Well, we just have less than a minute. That’s all the time we have. So I’ll just let you take that time, and make any final statement you’d like.
LINDA LEAR: I do want to tell your wonderful listeners that Rachel Carson should be a household name. I always have a problem because people want to call her Carlson or something, but it’s Carson. And she did not start the environmental movement, but she did indeed trigger it.
Her writing in Silent Spring woke people up. It made the American public understand that they had to ask questions to their government. They had to ask, “What are you putting in my food? What are you putting in my water? What is industry doing in the name of science that we don’t know about?” We have a right to know.
So all our right to know laws, our environmental protection, really comes from the broad consciousness that Rachel Carson started.
DEBRA: Thank you so much. We have so much to be grateful to her for. I’m sorry I started coughing right there while you were talking.
But thank you so much for being with us today. And thank you so much for everything that you’ve done to make the world know more about Rachel Carson.
LINDA LEAR: Thank you for having me. And Happy Earth Day, everybody.
DEBRA: Happy Earth Day. That’s Linda Lear, and you can learn more about her and her work at RachelCarson.org.
You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. We’ll be right back.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. It’s Earth Day today, and we’re celebrating the life and work of Rachel Carson who, as I mentioned at the beginning of the show, laid the groundwork for environmental awareness that led to the first Earth Day. Her book, Silent Spring, came out in 1962, and then there was so much more awareness of the environment that we had Earth Day in 1970. And after that, then the Environmental Protection Agency was created.
All of this, even everything that happened today, started—I mean, she wasn’t the founder of Earth Day or the Environmental Movement. But she did what was in her observation and her heart, which was to speak out about something that she knew was wrong and that people needed to know about. And I admire her so much for that.
So our next guest is Patricia DeMarco, and she’s been a Rachel Carson scholar since 2005. She’s the former director of the Rachel Carson Institute at the Chatham University. And she writes and speaks extensively on the environmental ethic of Rachel Carson and her relevance to modern times.
Hi, Patricia.
PATRICIA DEMARCO: Hello. How are you?
DEBRA: I’m very good. How are you?
PATRICIA DEMARCO: Thank you for having me with you today on this Earth Day.
DEBRA: It’s my pleasure.
So, tell us about what is Rachel Carson’s environmental ethic.
PATRICIA DEMARCO: Well, she really is credited with a constellation of concepts collected as the “precautionary principle.” If you look at her work in detail, it really has four parts. One is that to live in harmony with nature rather than trying to subjugate nature to man’s will, we find ways to live in harmony with the natural world.
And second, that you preserve and learn from the natural systems of the world. She was a systems thinker, and her studies allowed her to really understand that interconnectedness and the real importance of the ecosystem services to our own survival. that we should minimize the effects of man-made chemicals on the natural systems of the world.
She really was concerned about not only the burden of all the synthetic materials that were in the biosphere, but she recognized the value of concentration of materials as they go up the food chain. Again, not well-recognized at the time that she began writing, but now, evident everywhere around us, the concentration of chemicals means you have to prevent, rather than try to remove.
And finally, she considered the implications of human actions on the global web of life. She understood that we are interconnected to all of the other living creatures, and dependent upon them, and all of us dependent upon the living earth as the provider of our life support—fresh air, clean water, fertile ground, and the biodiversity of species.
So her environmental ethic was one of precaution and one of living in harmony with nature.
DEBRA: It’s so interesting to me. I agree with everything that you just said. I hadn’t read Silent Spring when I came to those same conclusions myself.
It wasn’t anything I was ever taught in school. Nobody ever said it to me. It was just that I got to a point in the late 1970s, so I guess it was maybe 15 years after Silent Spring. I became very sick from exposure to toxic chemicals, and I said, “Wait a minute.”
No, very, very sick, like disabled sick.
And I said, “Wait a minute. There’s something wrong here.”
And I was just living my standard American lifestyle that everybody lives, but I got sick. And as I started investigating where were the toxic chemicals, and how could I live without them, if you keep asking that question deeper and deeper and deeper, you fall out the bottom of the industrial world and say, “Wait a minute. There’s nature here.”
You’re not looking at the industrial consumer system anymore. You see that there are ecosystems, and that if you just step outside of the industrial toxic world, that there there’s actually life living in harmony with itself, and we actually belong to it. And that we’re as part of nature as a tree is.
And yet, because we live in this industrial world, and we’ve been defined by our culture to be separate from that, we have lost our connection.
PATRICIA DEMARCO: That’s very true. Our connectivity to the natural world is the key feature of our modern technological time. And in fact, we’re more and more separate from the natural world as we develop allergies, and aversions to being outside as a hostile place.
And people think of the built environment as their natural habitat when, in fact, we are really creatures of the earth ourselves.
DEBRA: Yes, we are.
PATRICIA DEMARCO: And are subject to the same laws of nature as all other living creatures.
And I think that has been one of the biggest challenges. Since Earth Day in 1970, we have become increasingly dependent on technology to fix things. And we’ve got to the point now where we’ve gone far beyond the capability to actually stick anything, most of the environmental laws that were passed in the early part of the Environment Movement in the 1976 period, 1972 to 1976, we’re attempting to control the most egregious symptom of environmental contamination.
We’ve put corks in the smoke stacks. We’ve put stoppers in the emission pipes. We’ve put liners in the landfill and thought that we are doing environmental improvement.
But with all of those laws, we have, by law, legally, under permit, 3.6-billion pounds per year of toxic materials released into the environment, and 2.1-billion pounds of fertilizer, herbicide and pesticides drenching our farm wind each year.
Rachel Carson described it as a barrage of poison, and we could not withstand this as living creatures.
You alluded earlier to the quote about our exposure to toxic chemicals from the moment of birth until death, and if you look at the Center for Disease Control’s national report on human exposures to environmental chemicals that’s done every two years, they found that there are 441 synthetic chemicals in the average U.S. adult, and 337 in newborn babies, and 79 of those are known to cause cancer and mutations in humans.
And yet, the burden is on the consumer to try to avoid these materials. We have had so many attempts to try to reform the laws that allow all of these emissions and we can’t even get them out of committee for action in the public interest.
DEBRA: I’m going to interrupt you because we need to go to break. And when we come back, we’ll continue to talk.
I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. This is Toxic Free Talk Radio. And my guest on this half of the show is Patricia DeMarco, who is the former head of the Rachel Carson Institute, and she’s writing a book on how toxic chemicals affect the environment.
We’ll be right back.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and one of my guests today is Patricia DeMarco, who has been a Rachel scholar since 2005, and she’s the former director of the Rachel Carson Institute of Chatham University.
We’re celebrating Rachel Carson for Earth Day. She was so instrumental in changing the awareness of the public prior to the founding of Earth Day, and we’re learning more about her today.
Patricia, so how are some ways that we can be applying, those of us who are listening, individuals, how can we apply Rachel Carson’s environmental ethic in our own lives?
PATRICIA DEMARCO: Well, the first thing is to be aware of all the things that you can control yourself that have toxic chemicals associated. The most obvious one being, if you have a garden or property of your own, absolutely stop putting herbicides, pesticides and toxic materials on the ground. It gets in the sewers, it gets into the water table, it is impossible to keep it isolated from our biosphere, and it’s totally unnecessary for domestic uses.
You will have an absolutely beautiful garden without any toxic materials. And if you want directions about how to do that, the National Wildlife Federation has a Gardener’s Guide for Global Warming, which is available very easily, that gives a lot of explicit details.
A second thing you can do is read the label on everything. And if you find toxic materials, and you can identify which they are by going to the Environmental Working Group, EWG.org, and identify the 12 that you absolutely must avoid in order to be healthy and safe.
You can do an inventory of your personal care products to identify non-toxic and non-endocrine-disrupting alternatives to things that are commercially made.
And one of my most important things that Rachel Carson did was she asked a lot of uncomfortable questions—things like, who has the right side for the countless legions of people who were not consulted that the supreme value is a world without insects, even though it will also be a sterile world ungrazed by the curving wind of the […] She questioned the benefits of technology applied without wisdom.
DEBRA: We absolutely should be questioning that. I don’t understand why the guiding purpose of the powers that be in the world today aren’t saying the number one most important thing we need to do is preserve life.
PATRICIA DEMARCO: We have had nine attempts to reform the Toxic Substances Control Act, most notably under the leadership of Senator Lautenberg, and it can’t even get out of Committee because the money, the interests, have a different perspective on their freedom to do whatever they want commercially.
Limitation of the freedom of commerce has prevailed. But freedom without responsibility, without accountability to the public interest will just yield chaos. And we’re very far down the road of having chaos prevail in this area because the public interest in being protected has not been honored in our laws.
Rachel Carson’s testimony to Congress in June of 1963 laid out some very reasonable and relevant concerns, even in 1963. She was concerned about exposure of workers to toxic materials in their workplace.
This is still a large concern, especially for migrant workers. She was concerned that we have biologically-based alternatives, and this has been a very controversial area because people are claiming that genetically-modified organisms are biological control systems.
But no one asked us if we wanted pesticides to be incorporated into our food products.
DEBRA: They didn’t ask me.
PATRICIA DEMARCO: They didn’t ask me either, so you can’t even always tell what has been modified to include pesticide in the product. Labeling has become a controversial subject, even labeling, to know whether something is organic or not took a large bite.
I think we have to have a broader public debate about the ethical determinations that are being made on our behalf without public discussion. And this applies not only to toxic materials in our environment, but also to our energy choices, many of which have toxic byproducts.
I think we have to be more engaged in the public debate about the laws and the policies that are being adopted or not adopted on behalf of public interest.
DEBRA: Wow. That’s a lot to say. I totally agree with all of it. I’m sitting here thinking how much—a lot of what you’re saying are things, I wouldn’t say they’re commonly known even now, but they’re known to me, and they’re ideas that I’ve come across in other places, or figured out for myself.
But they aren’t widely known, and yet, she was writing about them when nobody else was writing about them, or talking about them, or even thinking about these things.
PATRICIA DEMARCO: Right! I think she understood systems. She was thinking in systems. And much of what she predicted we have now seen in evidence as a result of things that she studied and knew about.
And I think one of the things that we have to really focus on here is going forward, not to continue trying to put Band-Aids on the symptoms, but to actually look at the root causes of our most egregious problems, and try to develop solutions which are based on curing the source of the problem instead of just continuing to patch up the air and the water emissions from things that really need to be replaced.
This is what I’m writing about in my own book. It’s Pathways to Our Sustainable Future, and to look at how do we address the root causes, not because we don’t have the technology to fix things, but because we need to apply the wisdom of natural systems in the choices that we’re making. And we need to choose things that solve the root problems.
So moving to renewable energy system instead of combustion of fossil fuels that were laid down in the last great extinction, doing things like making organic and sustainable agricultural practices, the mainstream component of our commercial agriculture, and looking at designing chemicals to be non-toxic on purpose rather than trying to clean up the risk from how much exposure you have.
Because many of them accumulate, and having the exposure controlled isn’t possible because they accumulate in the biosphere, so to design non-toxic products and byproducts.
And then to actually move to an economy that operates more like an ecosystem in circles, instead of going from raw material to trash, to find ways, to research a way, by design, design things for re-use, design things for being re-purposed, so you’d have an economy that goes in a cycle the way an ecosystem does.
DEBRA: Yes, I agree with all of those things. We’re absolutely on the same page.
PATRICIA DEMARCO: Thank you.
DEBRA: I’m writing about things all the time. I know if you’ve been to my website. I didn’t quite introduce myself thoroughly. You just go to ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com, and at the top in the menu, there’s a button called “shop” and you just click on shop, and there are about 700 websites where you can buy all kinds of non-toxic things for your home.
And if you click on “Q&A,” I’ve been talking with people for years. There are actually years of worth of dialogue about what people are looking for, and what kind of non-toxic solutions exist. So there’s a lot, lot, lot of answers here on my website that are just for free. People can just come and read them.
And you were talking about different examples of how we could move to something that is more sustainable and more oriented with nature, and I just want to emphasize just one because just out of all of those, I think the simplest one that we can do is if everybody would just switch to organic food, that is an example.
PATRICIA DEMARCO: […]
DEBRA: But that’s an example of how our food is produced by industrialization. It’s industrial food. When we eat refined sugar or refined salt or processed foods, all those things happened in factories. And even, there are factory farms. It’s agribusiness. It’s not agriculture.
And if everybody would just recognize this, we already have this technology of organic, and it’s being done, and it’s growing, and if everybody would just say, “We’re going to eat organic food now,” that would make such a difference in the world.
PATRICIA DEMARCO: It would be ideal, but one of the problems we have is that there are lots of places in this country that people don’t have access to any kinds of fresh produce. And there are places where people in those kinds of areas are taking land of their own volition, and growing their own food.
And I think the return to things like the victory gardens of the olden days makes so much sense because people can establish community composting, community gardens. And this is happening all of the country in many, many places that people begin to look at taking control of their own food chain, and being more familiar with it.
I think the more we know about how we develop our own food supply and our own energy supply, and taking responsibility for the quality of the food that we have—
DEBRA: I’m sorry to interrupt you in the middle of the sentence, but the music is going to come on in about four seconds. So I just need to say thank you so much. Happy Earth Day to everyone. Everybody, go out and find out something about Rachel Carson.
This is Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. Thank you.
