現(xiàn)代大學(xué)英語精讀3 Lesson 11 Silent Spring

1、Lesson 11 Silent Spring 1. About the Author vThe more clearly we can focus our attention on the wonders and realities of the universe about us, the less taste we shall have for destruction. - Rachel Carson 1954 vRachel Carson vBIRTHDATE: May 27, 1907 vEDUCATION: v1925- entered Pennsylvania College f

2、or Women (now Chatham College) 1929- graduated with honors, earning a scholarship to continue her studies at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, MD. 1932- M.A. in Zoology from John Hopkins University. vFAMILY BACKGROUND: The youngest of three children, Rachel Carson had a rugged upbringing in a s

3、imple farmhouse outside the western Pennsylvania river town of Springdale. She credited her mother with introducing her to the world of nature that became her lifelong passion. vDESCRIPTION OF ACCOMPLISHMENTS: After completing her education, Carson joined the U. S. Bureau of Fisheries as the writer

4、of a radio show entitled Romance Under the Waters, in which she was able to explore life under the seas and bring it to listeners. In 1936, after being the first woman to take and pass the civil service test, the Bureau of Fisheries hired her as a full-time junior biologist, and over the next 15 yea

5、rs, she rose in the ranks until she was the chief editor of all publications for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. vDuring the 1940s, Carson began to write books on her observations of life under the sea, a world as yet unknown to the majority of people. She resigned from her government position i

6、n 1952 in order to devote all her time to writing. The idea for her most famous book, Silent Spring, emerged, and she began writing it in 1957. It was published in 1962, and influenced President Kennedy, who had read it, to call for testing of the chemicals mentioned in the book. Carson has been cal

7、led the mother of the modern environmental movement. vDATE OF DEATH: April 14, 1964 vBIBLIOGRAPHY: v1941-Under the Sea Wind 1943-Food From the Sea: Fish and Shellfish of New England 1944-Food From the Sea: Fish and Shellfish of the South Atlantic 1951-The Sea Around Us 1955-The Edge of the Sea 1962-

8、Silent Spring 1965-The Sense of Wonder (posthumous) vRachel Carson, writer, scientist, and ecologist, grew up simply in the rural river town of Springdale, Pennsylvania. Her mother bequeathed to her a life-long love of nature and the living world that Rachel expressed first as a writer and later as

9、a student of marine biology. Carson graduated from Pennsylvania College for Women (now Chatham College) in 1929, studied at the Woods Hole Marine Biological Laboratory, and received her MA in zoology from Johns Hopkins University in 1932. vShe was hired by the U.S. Bureau of Fisheries to write radio

10、 scripts during the Depression and supplemented her income writing feature articles on natural history for the Baltimore Sun. She began a fifteen-year career in the federal service as a scientist and editor in 1936 and rose to become Editor-in-Chief of all publications for the U. S. Fish and Wildlif

11、e Service. She wrote pamphlets on conservation and natural resources and edited scientific articles, but in her free time turned her government research into lyric prose, first as an article Undersea (1937, for the Atlantic Monthly), and then in a book, Under the Sea-Wind (1941). In 1952 she publish

12、ed her prize-winning study of the ocean, The Sea Around Us, which was followed by The Edge of the Sea in 1955. These books constituted a biography of the ocean and made Carson famous as a naturalist and science writer for the public. Carson resigned from government service in 1952 to devote herself

13、to her writing. vShe wrote several other articles designed to teach people about the wonder and beauty of the living world, including Help Your Child to Wonder, (1956) and Our Ever-Changing Shore (1957), and planned another book on the ecology of life. Embedded within all of Carsons writing was the

14、view that human beings were but one part of nature distinguished primarily by their power to alter it, in some cases irreversibly. vDisturbed by the profligate use of synthetic chemical pesticides after World War II, Carson reluctantly changed her focus in order to warn the public about the long ter

15、m effects of misusing pesticides. In Silent Spring (1962) she challenged the practices of agricultural scientists and the government, and called for a change in the way humankind viewed the natural world. v Carson was attacked by the chemical industry and some in government as an alarmist, but coura

16、geously spoke out to remind us that we are a vulnerable part of the natural world subject to the same damage as the rest of the ecosystem. Testifying before Congress in 1963, Carson called for new policies to protect human health and the environment. Rachel Carson died in 1964 after a long battle ag

17、ainst breast cancer. Her witness for the beauty and integrity of life continues to inspire new generations to protect the living world and all its creatures. 2.About the text Silent Spring by Rachel Carson Sketches from one of the Twentieth Centurys most important works vA Fable for Tomorrow vThere

18、was once a town in the heart of America where all life seemed to live in harmony with its surroundings.a pastoral Eden of hardwood forests and bountiful wildlife.strange blight crept over the area and everything began to change.Everywhere was a shadow of death.It was a spring without voices. On the

19、mornings that had once throbbed with the dawn chorus of robins, catbirds, doves, jays, wrens, and scores of other bird voices there was now no sound; only silence lay over the fields and woods and marsh.Even the streams were now lifeless.No witchcraft, no enemy action had silenced the rebirth of new

20、 life in this stricken world. The people had done it themselves. vMan, however much he may like to pretend, is part of nature. vThe most alarming of all mans assaults upon the environment is the contamination of air, earth, rivers, and sea with dangerous and even lethal materials.The poisons circula

21、te mysteriously by underground streams until they emerge and, through the alchemy of air and sunlight, combine into new forms that kill vegetation, sicken cattle, and work unknown harm on those who drink from once pure wells.They travel from link to link of the food chain. vExterminism: Nonselective

22、 chemicals that have the power to kill every insect, the good and the bad, to still the song of birds and the leaping of fish in the streams, to coat the leaves with a deadly film, and to linger on in the soil.Can anyone believe it is possible to lay down such a barrage of poisons on the surface of

23、the earth without making it unfit for all life? They should not be called insecticides but biocides. vThe insects are winning: Were on a pesticide treadmill. The insects adapt to the particular insecticide used.forcing us to find ever deadlier new ones.Thus the chemical war is never won, and all lif

24、e is caught in its violent crossfire.many chemicals, like radiation, bring about gene mutations.Many of these substances are persistent and bio-accumulative. Health effects depend on exposure over time. Effects are delayed. But this can lull us: the danger is easily ignored. It is human nature to sh

25、rug off what may seem to us a vague threat of future disaster.Some of these substances have toxic effects in very small quantities. In the ecology of our bodies, minute causes produce mighty effects. vViolation of human rights: We have subjected enormous numbers of people to contact with these poiso

26、ns, without their consent and often without their knowledge. vSelf-endangerment: The chief public health threat has ceased to be disease; now it is a hazard we ourselves have introduced into our world. Indeed, we may be technically incapable of detecting the presence of some toxins.The lack of suffi

27、ciently delicate methods to detect injury before symptoms appear is one of the great unsolved problems in medicine. vWe are the subjects of a massive uncontrolled experiment: A human being, unlike a laboratory animal living under rigidly controlled conditions, is never exposed to one chemical alone.

28、we are subject to multiple exposures.This is a problem of ecology, of interrelationships, of interdependence. vWhy have we done this? Carson dismisses the claim that increased farm production necessitates this; as far as that goes overproduction is the real problem. Rather, the source lies in our mo

29、dern way of life, specifically: (1) agricultural intensification and its use of large scale monoculture (simplification destroys natures checks and balances); and (2) the migration of species with humans, both deliberately and accidentally (nearly half of the 180 or so major insect enemies of plants

30、 in the United States are accidental imports from abroad). vThe alternative: develop ecological knowledge and use it. We need the basic knowledge of animal populations and their relations to their surroundings, but we allow the chemical death to fall as though there were no alternative.Have we falle

31、n into a mesmerized state that makes us accept as inevitable that which is inferior and detrimental?.The choice, after all, is ours to make. vIf once we have at last asserted our right to know, we decide that we are being asked to take senseless and frightening risks, then we should no longer accept

32、 the counsel of those who tell us that we must fill our world with poisonous chemicals; we should look about and see what other course is open to us. vThe Story of Silent Spring How a courageous woman took on the chemical industry and raised important questions about humankinds impact on nature. vAl

33、though their role will probably always be less celebrated than wars, marches, riots or stormy political campaigns, it is books that have at times most powerfully influenced social change in American life. Thomas Paines Common Sense galvanized radical sentiment in the early days of the American revol

34、ution; Uncle Toms Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe roused Northern antipathy to slavery in the decade leading up to the Civil War; and Rachel Carsons Silent Spring, which in 1962 exposed the hazards of the pesticide DDT, eloquently questioned humanitys faith in technological progress and helped set th

35、e stage for the environmental movement. vCarson, a renowned nature author and a former marine biologist with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, was uniquely equipped to create so startling and inflammatory a book. A native of rural Pennsylvania, she had grown up with an enthusiasm for nature matche

36、d only by her love of writing and poetry. The educational brochures she wrote for the Fish and Wildlife Service, as well as her published books and magazine articles, were characterized by meticulous research and a poetic evocation of her subject. vThings Go Out of Kilter vCarson was happiest writin

37、g about the strength and resilience of natural systems. Her books Under the Sea Wind, The Sea Around Us (which stayed on the New York Times bestseller list for 86 weeks), and The Edge of The Sea were hymns to the inter-connectedness of nature and all living things. Although she rarely used the term,

38、 Carson held an ecological view of nature, describing in precise yet poetic language the complex web of life that linked mollusks to sea-birds to the fish swimming in the oceans deepest and most inaccessible reaches. vDDT, the most powerful pesticide the world had ever known, exposed natures vulnera

39、bility. Unlike most pesticides, whose effectiveness is limited to destroying one or two types of insects, DDT was capable of killing hundreds of different kinds at once. Developed in 1939, it first distinguished itself during World War II, clearing South Pacific islands of malaria-causing insects fo

40、r U.S. troops, while in Europe being used as an effective de-lousing powder. Its inventor was awarded the Nobel Prize. vWhen DDT became available for civilian use in 1945, there were only a few people who expressed second thoughts about this new miracle compound. One was nature writer Edwin Way Teal

41、e, who warned, A spray as indiscriminate as DDT can upset the economy of nature as much as a revolution upsets social economy. Ninety percent of all insects are good, and if they are killed, things go out of kilter right away. Another was Rachel Carson, who wrote to the Readers Digest to propose an

42、article about a series of tests on DDT being conducted not far from where she lived in Maryland. The magazine rejected the idea. vSilent Spring vThirteen years later, in 1958, Carsons interest in writing about the dangers of DDT was rekindled when she received a letter from a friend in Massachusetts

43、 bemoaning the large bird kills which had occured on Cape Cod as the result of DDT sprayings. The use of DDT had proliferated greatly since 1945 and Carson again tried, unsuccessfully, to interest a magazine in assigning her the story of its less desirable effects. By 1958 Carson was a best-selling

44、author, and the fact that she could not obtain a magazine assignment to write about DDT is indicative of how heretical and controversial her views on the subject must have seemed. Having already amassed a large quantity of research on the subject, however, Carson decided to go ahead and tackle the D

45、DT issue in a book. vFirst serialized in The New Yorker in June 1962, the book alarmed readers across America and, not surprisingly, brought a howl of indignation from the chemical industry. If man were to faithfully follow the teachings of Miss Carson, complained an executive of the American Cyanam

46、id Company, we would return to the Dark Ages, and the insects and diseases and vermin would once again inherit the earth. Monsanto published and distributed 5,000 copies of a brochure parodying Silent Spring entitled The Desolate Year, relating the devastation and inconvenience of a world where fami

47、ne, disease, and insects ran amuck because chemical pesticides had been banned. Some of the attacks were more personal, questioning Carsons integrity and even her sanity. vVindication vHer careful preparation, however, had paid off. Anticipating the reaction of the chemical industry, she had compile

48、d Silent Spring as one would a lawyers brief, with no fewer than 55 pages of notes and a list of experts who had read and approved the manuscript. Many eminent scientists rose to her defense, and when President John F. Kennedy ordered the Presidents Science Advisory Committee to examine the issues t

49、he book raised, its report thoroughly vindicated both Silent Spring and its author. As a result, DDT came under much closer government supervision and was eventually banned. The public debate moved quickly from whether pesticides were dangerous to which pesticides were dangerous, and the burden of p

50、roof shifted from the opponents of unrestrained pesticide use to the chemicals manufacturers. vThe most important legacy of Silent Spring, though, was a new public awareness that nature was vulnerable to human intervention. Rachel Carson had made a radical proposal: that, at times, technological pro

51、gress is so fundamentally at odds with natural processes that it must be curtailed. Conservation had never raised much broad public interest, for few people really worried about the disappearance of wilderness. But the threats Carson had outlined - the contamination of the food chain, cancer, geneti

52、c damage, the deaths of entire species - were too frightening to ignore. For the first time, the need to regulate industry in order to protect the environment became widely accepted, and environmentalism was born. vCarson was well aware of the larger implications of her work. Appearing on a CBS docu

53、mentary about Silent Spring shortly before her death from breast cancer in 1964, she remarked, Mans attitude toward nature is today critically important simply because we have now acquired a fateful power to alter and destroy nature. But man is a part of nature, and his war against nature is inevita

54、bly a war against himself?#91;We are challenged as mankind has never been challenged before to prove our maturity and our mastery, not of nature, but of ourselves. vOne of the landmark books of the 20th century, Silent Springs message resonates loudly today, even several decades after its publicatio

55、n. And equally inspiring is the example of Rachel Carson herself. Against overwhelming difficulties and adversity, but motivated by her unabashed love of nature, she rose like a gladiator in its defense. . . . to protect human health and the environment 3. About Environmental Protection Humboldt Bay

56、 Master Petroleums gold mining plan would take up to 190,000 gallons of water every day from Canyon Creek Case summaries, legal briefs, and other info Cases filed - 1997 to the present Cases Filed 1982-1996 Legal Highlights some of EPICs success stories vIts been decades since EPIC first entered the

57、 courtroom to challenge the degradation of public trust resources and the governments complacency to violations of environmental laws. Since that time we have filed more than 70 lawsuits on behalf of the native species and wildlands of the North Coast. Although our work is focused on the redwood and

58、 Douglas fir ecosystems of northern California, many of our cases have set legal precedents to help restore and protect imperiled areas throughout the region, state and nation. EPICs legal actions today employ a number of different strategies and are focused on three primary program areas: industria

59、l logging on private and state land, National Forest conservation, and actions to defend Humboldt Bay. vBushs Abysmal Record vUnder the Bush Administration, the number of new species added to the endangered list has dramatically declined, but not because things have improved for imperiled fish and w

60、ildlife. This administration is the first to have failed to list a single species on its own initiative, and also the first to deny listings more times than it has granted them. vSince Bush Jr. took office, the FWS has listed a total of only 31 species-fewer than either the Bush Sr. or Reagan Admini