Speaker 1:	Thank you, Peter, for that excessive introduction. It is so amazing. It's an amazing honor to be here, and I very much enjoyed watching Sara Hiebert Burch's presentation last night. She gave me a few lead-ins. Those of you who heard her will pick up on a couple of the threads. We're celebrating the 50th anniversary of a book, one still in print and still considered a landmark of, well, a number of things. It's often included on many lists of most important or most harmful books, but why? Because it was especially well-written or was a breakthrough in environmental understanding? Because it sounded an alarm and caused an uproar? 
	Let me explain right now that I'm not an environmental historian, much less a scientist. As you just heard from Peter, my field of interest is books and book publishing, not defining what books are, but what books do, how they function, how they're perceived, how they're used. We're celebrating the half century of Silent Spring's existence since it's publication in '62. It represents an unquestionable landmark in public discussion of science and the environment. It also provides a wonderful Bell Jar example of how a book could interact with 20th Century media to get a potentially challenging topic onto the public agenda. The two aspects, dissent and environmental science have become inextricably linked, directly affecting the likelihood of another future Silent Spring. 
	Now, starting with context, it's post-war America, typically described as a time of increasing middle class wealth, suburban living and Cold War attention to education, especially in the sciences. There was also explosive growth in the media system. In broadcasting FM radio was still a very localized medium in its infancy, but AM radio had carried news through two world wars and a police action. It was becoming a thriving local medium for entertainment, music and local news, as well as the relatively new introduction of call-in talk shows where there was plenty of discussion of Silent Spring, especially on early morning farm reports. Television had grown enough to saturate the popular market. By 1962, almost every living room had a black and white set that got three national networks, some local stations and a very young educational television workshop, network. Workshop came later. 
	TV fed a growing demand for visual and immediate news. Development of local affiliates drew on national network's prestige and resources. Thus, as radio became more local television developed an increasingly national scope, which turned out to be quite important for the course of Silent Spring's public life. Turning to print, many thought that television was going to finish the print media, just as it was going to do to movies and radio. Newspapers, however, were benefiting from ad revenues at a time of burgeoning consumerism, and they provided an excellent bridge between the local and national scene. Sunday papers were actually enjoying a sort of heyday with large circulation, and they got to be quite heavy, and a widening variety of columns and sections, which was where a lot of the Silent Spring debate took place. 
	At the same time, magazines were benefiting greatly from discovering the endless possibilities of market segmentation. As for books, it was the second golden age of publishing. People were not giving up reading to watch TV just yet, and publishers had enough revenue from best-sellers to cover taking risks on books that the public might not like, or that could even be liabilities for the publishers. In an interview with me just before he died, Paul Brooks, who was Carson's editor and good friend, and he was also a nature writer himself, he told me he had to work to sell the Houghton Mifflin board on the project. He said, "Even with Rachel's name, this wasn't necessarily going to be an easy book to sell since the subject itself was rather forbidding. Who wants to read a book about pesticides?"
	One last cultural aspect of the late 50s and early 60s is worth pointing out. There was rising doubt about this new mid-century world of science and technology. People worried about nuclear bomb testing, fallout, Strontium-90 in milk. They worried about incomplete research as deformed children were born to Thalidomide-taking mothers. There were already those who were worried about chemical pesticides. Several communities were upset by mishaps with fire and gypsy moth spraying projects. Farm workers were already calling attention to health problems they knew came from the agricultural chemicals. There was a cranberry scare that had devastated the 1959 Thanksgiving market because some Northwestern cranberry fields had suffered some toxic contamination by the wrong pesticide. Concurrently, there were renewed questions about social values. Not just about science and technology, but civil rights, the profit motive and governmental integrity. 
	Now, turning to Rachel Carson herself, she had an established reputation as a lyrical, informed and popular nature writer. She had three books on marine environment already to her credit, and two of them were best-sellers. Although she'd included some comments here and there about human impact on shore and ocean life, she was by no means considered a polemic writer at that point. At the time remember the phrase "balance of nature" was thought to connote irrational, cult-like sentimentality, the very opposite of what was scientific. Thus, the fact that Carson held a Master's in botany from Johns-Hopkins, which was unusual for a woman of that era, would become very significant in defending Silent Spring. 
	In writing Silent Spring, moreover, she spent more than four years pursuing extensive and scientifically-based research. She would harvest references from one article, contact all the researchers cited in that one to get further references. Then, she would repeat the process each time, which generated a huge number of files that now take up acres of archival shelf space. Moreover, as she wrote she submitted each chapter to specialists for further critique. What's important to spotlight here is that beyond her professional approach there was the perceived necessity that the public be aware of it, especially given the certainty that critics would disparage or ignore her credentials and confidence. Her compelling mission was to inform the public about how little was known about pesticide safety. Hopefully, they would mobilize to talk, not only with each other, but with policy makers, legislatures and so on. 
	In her book she quoted Jean Rostand, "The obligation to endure gives us the right to know." Her broader mission was to expand public consciousness of how natural systems worked. Although she didn't usually say so explicitly in public, she hoped to set political systems in motion to correct the ignorance and malpractices, all in the name of nature and the public good. Reserved though she was, she had sophistication and experience in dealing with the public. Having published numerous articles, magazine articles as well as books, she knew ahead of time the cost as well as the power of working with the media. After some bad experiences she had concluded, "My proper field is books where an author can call his soul his own."
	She understood the benefits of independence from advertiser or commercial control, and that a book could give a lone citizen's voice the best access to the entire system, print and broadcast, local and national. Again, she was not the first to worry about chemical pesticides hazards, publicly or in print. Conservationists, I'm sure you know, was what they were called then. Notably, including the Audubon Society, had long been question damage to wildlife and protesting the government's insect "eradication" projects. 
	So, when Silent Spring came along what made it different? It's easy to say Carson did what she did so well. She did write well, she knew how to connect, or to say that she had good timing or special support by publishers and friends in high places from John Kennedy to The Washington Post to Supreme Court justice Douglas. Some say, cynically, but with justification, that it was because the chemical industry ill-advisedly rose to her bait. Most now say that by expertly explaining the environment as a system of systems and thereby redeeming the idea of a balance of nature, she also gave new structure to the entire discussion of the environment.
	Now, to begin tracking the book's progress with the winter of '62, other than to say it had been a tough, long four years of work during which Rachel struggled both with family trials and health problems, including the breast cancer that finally killed her, it's important to note that what was in production was not just a book. She was concurrently preparing a draft for the New Yorker magazine. As it turned out, the New Yorker version was far more than a sort of secondary appearance. It was pivotal in how Silent Spring would rise and be received into public life. As she worked with William Shawn, who was the famous editor-in-chief of the New Yorker for many years, he got so excited about it that he wanted to run it in six parts. Eventually he settled on just three that would run in three consecutive issues in June. 
	Now please note, the publication of the magazine would come almost three full months before the planned Houghton Mifflin publication in late September or early October. The later winter and early spring of '62 were devoted to editing, revising and, most significantly, vetting both the book and the magazine manuscripts. Now, among magazines, the New Yorker was legendary, equally for its rigorous fact-checking and for its strict partition between editorial and marketing departments. You could even say that the New Yorker came close to having a book's authority and autonomy. In any case, far from competing, the two publications enhanced each other, giving Carson's message a mutually reinforced stature. But, the fact that the magazine series appeared first created a special situation. 
	At first glance, the two publications, series and book, seemed pretty much identical, except that the book has notes and magazine articles don't. All the careful vetting meant that the wording of the two texts had to match as precisely as possible, but there was a notable difference in organization. After the book's famous opening chapter, Fable for Tomorrow, which described a polluted, bird song-less town, chapter two of the book very quickly and concisely lays out her thesis and her orientation. On page 12 there's a pivotal statement, "It is not my contention that chemical pesticides must never be used." She goes on to say, "We have allowed these chemicals to be used with little or no advanced investigation of their effect on soil, water, wildlife and man himself."
	The rest of the book goes on, then, to look at examples and histories in each of several areas, earth, air, water, wildlife and man himself, as she said. Now, by contrast, the New Yorker imposed a more journalistic order on the material, dram and excitement and action first, explanation and comment later. The first installment, which was the June 16th, 1962 issue, does begin with the dramatic parable, and then it plunges directly into the examples and histories, which go on into the second installment. It's not until the third installment in the June 30th issue that the more general observations appear, above all, that disclaimer. Yet, between June 7th or 8th, which is when the June 16th issue would actually have hit the news stands and homes, in the end of June a lot was set in motion. 
	Early-on, the media, familiar with Carson and probably alerted by Houghton Mifflin, noticed the articles and the questions they raised. A previewing editorial in the New York Times referred to a possible Nobel Prize. Wire services soon picked up that Nobel comment, and there were responses to it all around the country. As it happened, one of the earliest notices of Silent Spring was a cartoon in the Des Moines Register pitched to Midwestern farmers, some of whom had already written their own letters to the editor. 
	At the same time, in the chemical industry and in government offices, notably the Department of Agriculture, those who weren't already on high alert quickly joined those who were. The National Agricultural Chemicals Association, the NACA, set up a now well-known PR war chest of 250 thousand dollars, which in today's dollars is probably over two million, may even be as much as three million or more. Hoping to preemptively discredit her research, they set a cadre of readers to work scouring the magazine texts for her references while urgent requests went to Houghton Mifflin for preview copies of the book that would have the footnotes. For a number of reasons, including the absolutely obviously, Houghton Mifflin refused.
	Again, remember for two out of the three weeks of the June New Yorkers no one had seen Carson's disclaimer. But, much of the material to rebut or discredit Silent Spring was already being drafted, and it was very easy to portray both book and author as absolutists. Immediately after the first installment a chemical company lawyer called the New Yorker with a thinly veiled warning of a lawsuit if they weren't careful with chemical names in the remaining installments. The New Yorkers' in-house response, "Let him sue." Later, Monsanto's Dan Forester would say, "New Yorker Magazine was the trigger. Without an assist from the New Yorker, Monsanto might very well have adopted a safe and cautious course of not making waves."
	By the time the third installment appeared with the disclaimer, it could have seemed merely a weak, qualifying afterthought and easily missed by many readers. As we know, criticism of Silent Spring's legacy to this day still tend to hinge on depicting Carson and her book as seeking a complete ban on all pesticides, or, paradoxically, of just DDT, even though the book took on several other chemicals. 
	Okay, excuse me, during the summer of 1962 between the articles and the book the media began to hum. Carson's agent, Marie Rodell, began tabulating, clipping service notices, although she eventually just couldn't keep up with the growing number. You can get an idea. This is just for one week in August. At the same time, the New Yorker was being deluged with a record number of letters, which is interesting on several accounts. First of all, the magazine at that time didn't publish letters to the editor, so the 500 people who wrote were doing so just out of a sheer need to tell the magazine what they thought. 
	98% of them, I counted, praised Carson, Shawn and the magazine. Many requested reprints, but even more interesting were those who wanted to know when the book would be out, or who urged, "Hey, this ought to be a book." Some wanted a book to keep, despite having already read the articles. Others wanted to pass it around or send copies to legislators or to the White House. One writer said he wanted to send a copy to the president "morocco bound". Some said it should come out as a book so that it would reach more people. 
	Consider these numbers, Houghton Mifflin originally set their print run at 60 thousand copies, but in view of the summer ruckus, as Paul Brooks called it, they raised it to 100 thousand, which is unusually large for non-fiction of the era, nevermind a book about such an off-putting topic. But, compare that with the New Yorkers circulation at the time, about 450 thousand. Statistically, the magazine's reach was four and a half times the book publisher's. If people thought of the book as a medium of record, they also considered it the best way to reach the most people, and so did those already considering Silent Spring a problem or a threat. 
	Park Brinkley, then CEO of the NACA, wrote to a colleague in the Department of Agriculture, "I think Ms. Carson has set up a potentially dangerous chain of events. I'm not particularly concerned about her book itself. I'm concerned about the many other pieces that will be written as the result of it." The challenge of answering a book generally, and Silent Spring specifically, whether or not in print yet, came up in the media. "How do you fight a best-seller?" was the question with regard to the forthcoming Silent Spring. A few did counsel ignoring the book, and some managed to respond to the arguments without naming either title or author, but in general they just went at it head-on.
	Now, one approach to fighting a best-seller was to mirror the book's use of supporting documentation and references. The NACA's ubiquitous booklet "Fact and Fancy", you can see how attractive it was, actually incorporated several direct but unattributed quotes from Silent Spring, which irked Paul Brooks enough to consider suing them for plagiarism. These quotes were set against countering industry facts, and, yet, the booklet sported all of three footnotes, one providing the credentials of one critic, and two referring to the same single report. 
	There were numerous direct campaigns, and many of them included that brochure along with others offering expert rebuttal. This is a book-of-the-month club edition, and when I bought it at a used book store I found these tucked into the end flap with it. These were, clearly, from one of the packets that I knew got sent out. If anybody's curious about these, welcome to come up and take a look at them later. Perhaps the most memorable was a vivid parody that appeared first in the Monsanto corporate magazine and eventually was broadly circulated to major newspapers and influential people. "The Desolate Year" mimicked Silent Spring's first chapter using florid language and often revolting images to dramatize the horrors of a world without pesticides, victim of untamed nature gone horribly wild. "The insects emerge, creeping and flying, crawling into the open. They were chewers and piercer-suckers, spongers, siphoners and chewer-lappers and all their vast progeny were chewers, rasping, sawing. Biting maggots and worms and caterpillars," and I would go on but I see some of you are eating. 
	As the media and the opposition vibrated over the summer, Paul Brooks had upgraded it all to a super ruckus, so did Houghton Mifflin. In final production it's scrambling to match publicity with the uproar. In early August, the same lawyer who'd called the New Yorker, but writing this time on Velsicol letterhead sent Houghton Mifflin's chairman a long letter of requests and warnings. Although based on the magazine series, the letter went quite a bit further than the phone call had, and it came in the middle of the publisher's traditional vacation in August, and they pulled everybody back from vacation. 
	Paul Brooks and Houghton Mifflin vice president Lovell Thompson were rather more worried than William Shawn had been because they had a lot more at stake. Although legal action wasn't likely to actually stop production of the book, it most certainly and most destructively could delay it, throwing production and publicity plans into chaos. Any word of litigation would undermine credibility, even if only trademark names were at issue, and even if Houghton Mifflin eventually won the lawsuits. Moreover, delay endangered rights negotiations, such as a deal with the Book of the Month Club, which set Silent Spring as it's October selection. Lawyers were consulted. A few changes were made, and publication proceeded on schedule with new confidence. 
	Hopes for a good reception were boosted when President Kennedy referred directly to Ms. Carson's book at a news conference in late August. Now, obviously, given the timing, still in August, what he'd read was in the magazines, not in the book. But, on the strength of what he'd read, Kennedy set up a special committee of the Presidential science advisory counsel, which was called the PSAC, to investigate policy and research on pesticides. 
	Finally, official book publication came on September 27th, 1962, and with it the expected flood of media attention. There was more praise and more argument, book reviews, editorials, columns and articles appeared promptly continuing well into the fall and the winter. People wrote letters to the editor and others reacted by submitting more letters. Wire services buzzed with syndicated commentary, often with sidebar biographies or how-to's regarding home pesticides. 
	In general, public response was positive or at least interested, particularly in general interest in consumer-oriented media. Nature and gardening publications took due note, although sometimes a little tepidly among groups who'd already been raising the issue of pesticide hazard long since, and there was the criticism. Among others, Time Magazine called it "A real shocker, unfair, one-sided and hysterically over-emphatic with over-simplifications and downright errors," in quoting one chemical company consultant. Chemical and agribusiness trade journals, of course, argued the merits and found fault. Their criticism ran the gamut from predictable vitriol to thoughtful, if negative, evaluation. There even was one gracious, semi-public acknowledgement that, perhaps, Carson had done the industry favor by raising questions worth asking.
	Meanwhile, the NACA sent out some chemical industry spokesmen, and they were all men, on a lecture tour that gave them exposure in local newspapers and radio stations. Meanwhile, for Rachel and her agent, Houghton Mifflin wasn't always quick or thorough enough responding to the opposition tactics. She urged them to compile answers to broadsides like Fact and Fancy, but it took until February of '63, and now we're exactly 50 years later, that they sent her a pamphlet to review, weary and nauseated as she was by radiation treatments for the cancer that was getting steadily worse. 
	Meanwhile, the chemical industry had been monitoring things. The DuPont public relations department, like other industry PR offices, was sending management regular press analysis reports that for many months had focused intently on Silent Spring. In the February 20th DuPont press analysis, so that would have been two days ago because it's actually the same configuration of days of the week, the first paragraph called attention to the specific battle ground where Carson's mission most concerned them, "Legislation and regulation on the use of agricultural chemicals are terms now appearing in much of the press concerning Rachel Carson's Silent Spring and the ensuing controversy. There is still plenty based on what do you think about her views, but and increasing volume reflects the varying local and national opinion on what to do about them."
	I emphasize those two terms, legislation and regulation, because up to that time they were very rarely used in public opposition to Silent Spring. Critics depended mostly on rhetoric about the author's hysteria, or the book's credibility, or the lack here of. The DuPont report went on to excerpt articles indicating Silent Spring's likely impact on government, above all on congress and the department of agriculture. The articles were taken from newspapers in San Antonio, Atlanta, Omaha, Milwaukee, Augusta, Maine, Roanoke, Virginia and so on. Indeed, the debate diaspora for the five months after publication largely rolled across a sometimes patchy geographic media-scape. Mostly local or regional, but occasionally following the national reach of general print, particularly in magazines. 
	Now let's look at why Silent Spring could command this kind of press attention. First, news media don't generally have the resources to deal with complex topics, especially in science. In 1962, they usually didn't have the money, time or specialized experts, and they certainly don't have that now. A book could give the media a compact analysis of a subject, complete with notes and documentation that they could assume was authoritative without their having to do any of the work. Paul Brooks had taken special care setting up Silent Spring's impressive 55 pages of end notes. Even if one sharp-eyed critic did notice that there is some white space inflation resulted from repetitive formatting. If you notice there's a repeat of the page number for each note. Those of you who have to deal with note formatting don't usually do that anymore.
	Moreover, it's a truism of journalism that it's far easier to cover an event than it is to cover an issue. Although what Silent Spring summarized was a very complicated issue, its publication, especially as a possible blockbuster, and even with the warmup from the New Yorker, provided a reportable event, an event that, that luckily for the press lead to more reportable events in the forms of reactions by those who disagreed or those oxen had been gored. Thereby, the media were provided with instant controversy, something that could be covered event by event, assertion and rebuttal, parry and thrust. Little serves the journalistic community better than a dramatic, "Let's you and them have a fight."
	However, note that the public usually wearies of squabbling that goes on too long. They have a preference as an audience, if not participants and voters, for some kind of resolution. After a while they want to know who's right and who's wrong, who wins and who loses, either by victory clearly won or by some judgment handed down. Again, Silent Spring's public life came in a perfect storm with what seemed to be at the time a perfect resolution, as you'll see. 
	By now, if you've been paying attention, you should be wondering why I haven't talked yet about the television coverage. Well, for a reason that turned out to be fortuitous, it really wasn't much in play until late in the super ruckus. At the time, and arguably even to today, CBS Reports was a series that represented the gold standard in TV documentary and investigative journalism. Early in September of 1962, again, before the book, CBS producers approached Houghton Mifflin and Rachel Carson for an interview for a future program. Their eventual agreement stipulated that Rachel could make no other broadcast appearances until after the CBS show aired. Hence, her live presence in media was limited, not only by her unreliable health, but also by an agreement that she probably welcomed because it gave her continued privacy. Their interview wasn't filmed until late November. Her health meant some of the delay, at one point the producer Jay McMillan wrote CBS executive Fred Friendly that he thought they had, "A very sick author on their hands," and there were some other still unexplained corporate issues. 
	As things worked out, the program itself was not to air for many more months. In late March when CBS sent Rachel the names of other interviewees for the program, she apprehensively wrote her closest friend, Dorothy Freeman, that, "I'm pretty sure I won't like the program. It seems to me the show is weighted against me, and I'm rather annoyed." Writing again a few days later, she reported that a senate committee member had heard that there was heavy pressure to water-down the PSAC report. Remember that presidential subcommittee? Well, their report was soon to be presented in congress, and that gossip made her still more apprehensive about the CBS program. 
	On Wednesday, April 3rd, 1963 after months of attention in local print and magazines and despite a heavy letter writing campaign asking all advertisers to pull their ads, CBS Reports presented the Silent Spring debate for the first time, a national, immediate and compellingly visual platform. CBS Reports the Silent Spring of Rachel Carson brought images of authoritative criticism from the likes of chemical company spokesman Robert White Stevens, lab-coated and speaking in imposing, if very peculiar diction. In contrast, there was startling footage of DDT being sprayed on children. I'm old enough to remember being rushed into our house whenever spray trucks hissed among our neighborhood streets. 
	Above all, it was the country's first view of Rachel Carson in person, wearing a wig because of the radiation, but steadfast, knowledgeable and calm. I have a YouTube clip with video with some clips from the program that I'll show you at the end here. Through the hour-long program with comparatively few ads, which didn't bother CBS because they had the ratings, the airtime given to each side was minutely calibrated, almost to the second for equal time, offering a slavishly two-sided view and therefore, presumably, objective. In fact, Eric Sevareid's closing ruminations offered so carefully balanced summation that some reviewers and many members of the public complained that he had stopped tantalizing short of delivering his conclusion. 
	Almost certainly, that program had been strategically scheduled because exactly six weeks later, on Wednesday, May 15th, the PSAC report was presented to congress. CBS, obviously given notice and a copy of the report, broadcast its followup program that very same evening. They titled it "The Verdict on Silent Spring". Now the public had a kind of resolution and media were lavish with words like vindication, while Silent Spring's critics grumbled in comparatively low profile that the full story had yet to be told.
	Rachel Carson had, indeed, had a victory in the government and media arenas that, ultimately, mattered most to her mission. Her confidant Dorothy wrote to her that evening, "Well, I guess this is the day that will go down in history as Rachel's triumph, May 15th, and I doubt if you could have summed it up any better than did Eric Sevareid, a voice of warning and a fire under the government." Later in June Carson testified at two senate hearings, and a few major papers covered it, but the super ruckus had abated sharply, and shortly it was all but gone. Her death the following spring prompted a somewhat muted coda in the media, mixing praise, sorrow and a little indirect soft-pitch criticism. From the media's point of view, once the controversy had, apparently, been settled, Silent Spring had lost its public life at roughly the same time Rachel had lost her own life to cancer. That was the spring of the following year.
	But, were the issue and the book truly dead? Well, not really. Silent Spring is still in print after all, which is very unusual in current publishing economic structures. It's still causing intermittent ruckuses. Note that two things have been abidingly true about Silent Spring's post-publication life. First the title and the name of the author have become iconic shorthand for an entire set of issues that over time expanded beyond the use of a couple of specific chemicals into far-reaching ecological mindfulness and into persistently growing division between political and economic and philosophical factions.
	It has become as easy for one side to take up the phrase "Silent Spring" as an all-purpose cudgel as it has for the other to invoke it as great inspiration. The second true thing is that this phenomenon happens regardless of whether people actually read the book. It was true in 1962 and '63 when some letters to editor urged, "You should read this book," and others warned, "Don't read that book." Some editors were not even slightly embarrassed to admit that they hadn't read it. This was an editorial in the Lynchburg, Virginia News, and it was, by no means the only one I found. Yet, Carson not only expected that, she used it to her advantage when answering accusations that she wanted an across-the-board ban or dealing with misrepresentations of her science.
	Whether as a beacon of environmental virtue or an instigator of great social evil, it continues to be true that a good number of the commentators and debaters who feel free to invoke Silent Spring have read little or nothing of the book itself, but this is not unusual for landmark books. Many best-sellers are written by a fraction of the people who will eventually discuss them. Authors of books in Silent Spring's tradition, which is the tradition of advocacy, investigation and exposé, don't count on every member of the audience actually reading their book. They count on a large audience that, based on what they read or hear of others reading, clearly receive some form of the author's message. On that basis they can be moved to act. 
	This dynamic is what an author's mission depends on, and Rachel Carson was as savvy on this count as any other author of the 20th Century. In the time I have left here it would be both impossible and foolhardy to try to give you an adequate survey of all that has happened to Silent Spring since the 60s, but I'll try to give you the decade-by-decade turbo tour. By the 70s the environmental movement was gathering steam despite the political and military tumult of the time. Earth day was inaugurated, the EPA was established. In 1972, fully 10 years after publication, a push to ban DDT in the U.S., just in the U.S., succeeded. Silent Spring and its author were both praised and castigated as if they were the sole, direct reason for that. In 1979 West Coast poet Ferlinghetti wrote a poem that linked the recent Three Mile Island accident with Silent Spring. 
	Moving into the 80s, environmentalism and the term ecology were well-entrenched. A 17 cent stamp was minted in '81, and some longer-view retrospectives came out. In an exceptional Esquire history, Jeffrey Norman looked back to '69 when Time Magazine, remember they really were quite critical originally of Silent Spring, they inaugurated a new section of their magazine called The Environment and featuring a photograph of Rachel Carson. His conclusion was the book had prevailed. In 1987 Houghton Mifflin produced a 25th anniversary with an introduction from the aging Paul Brooks. 
	The 90s brought new energy and scope to ecological discussions, not the least of which being then vice president Al Gore's personal involvement. He wrote the introduction to another special edition of Silent Spring in '94. The close of both decade and century brought retrospectives on just about everything, and Silent Spring appeared on just about all discussions of the century's important books, although not without some of the familiar disputes. U.S. News and World Report titled their look back "The Pen is Mightier than DDT". Although that story exhumed the old insinuation that Carson suspected pesticides of causing her cancer, and that's why she'd done the study, it drew parallels with new worries about genetically engineered crops. 
	Also, toward the turn of the millennium two trends were interacting to set the stage for a new ruckus. Concerns about deterioration were moving steadily to the forefront for public awareness. Just as political polarization was beginning to dominate the media. Conflict between environmentalism and private sector anti-regulation was becoming particularly acrimonious, often revisiting environmental history. This was in England in The Spectator. 
	For a complex set of reasons, the rehabilitation of DDT became a battle cry, and a major strategy was to spotlight and retroactively discredit Silent Spring and Rachel Carson, easily targeted, even after four decades. Partisan's lines were clearly being redrawn. I thought you'd be interested in something that showed up in the Philadelphia Inquirer. On Earth Day, April 2001, they carried a short piece by Jonah Goldberg arguing that conservatives are the real Green Party insofar as, "Capitalism is the fastest route to a clean environment," since conservatives and the wealthy were responsible for recent cleanups and because they respected facts more than liberals did.
	Paul Rosier on the Villanova history faculty wrote back, "While growing up in Swarthmore, I took part in the first Earth Day. I'll never forget working with my classmates and teachers to haul trash from the dirty creek that flowed behind the school. Goldberg makes the disingenuous argument that capitalism is the force behind the passage of environmental legislation. Actually, it was American citizens inspired by fact such as those revealed by Rachel Carson in Silent Spring, who forced politicians to adopt stricter environmental standards."
	Similar exchanges had cropped up around the country as Carson's 100th birthday approached in 2007. Tina Rosenberg's New York Times piece in April of 2004 had really set a strident tone, talking about what the world needs now is DDT, and declaring that Silent Spring was killing millions of children and sidestepping the point that DDT was actually already being used legally in many epidemic areas. In June 2007, also in the Times, and, remember, this is the Times that was her champion, thought maybe she ought to have a Nobel prize, John Tierney decried her legacy as junk science, suggesting that students who actually read Silent Spring, in other words he doesn't want them to read it either, said that they were actually learning bad lessons. 
	In the same era, and most significantly, mushrooming use of the internet was challenging all other media, well on its way to becoming a primary source of public information and exchange. By 2007 the Net was giving environmental debates even more vigor, new dimensions and more complexity. Arguments raged and still are raging about Silent Spring on websites, in the blogosphere, with responding comments that can go well into the combat zone. There are even libelous accusations, some comparing Carson to Hitler thanks to a character in a Michel Creighton novel, and inaccurate and some substantiated pseudo facts presented as facts.
	Whereas carefully-chosen letters to the editor might concisely weigh the arguments in print media, these agitated web skirmishes can go viral with endless screens of anonymous volleys. Websites like Rachel Was Wrong can appear, often without identified hosts or sponsors, as this one was hosted by the Competitive Enterprise Institute. In turn, they can be linked or quoted on numerable other websites and live on forever, endlessly mutable. As you're all aware, Wikipedia entries can be written, edited, reedited and re-reedited, and that has certainly happened with Silent Spring and Rachel Carson's Wiki entries. I've watched them and now they're kind of a constant disclaimer about the [inaudible 00:45:30] content. 
	The specific drama around DDT and malaria has subsided somewhat thanks to the Gates Foundation's attention, a few medical breakthroughs and some spotty corrections of the record. The problem for the media-consuming public is that we have more information than ever about Silent Spring, about Rachel Carson, pesticides, malaria, government policies, ecology and the environment, even the very nature of science itself. Yet, there's less verification, less accuracy, less attribution, less clarity and less authority than ever.
	This fundamental change in the media system poses the inevitable question as to whether a book like Silent Spring could happen again in the 21st century. Even more so, as the structure of publishing itself is changing radically. Distributors, like Amazon, Google, Barnes and Nobel, are moving towards preempting the role of publishers. As they successfully challenge intellectual property rights, including the ownership, control and rewards of content, the work of editors, investigators, fact-checkers, researches, and even that of independent authors is being marginalized, both financially and culturally. Moreover, electronic publishing is increasingly driven by production and marketing metrics and not so much by anything resembling editorial content values, currently, the focus on which E-reader device will predominate, and content will follow that. 
	The potential impact on scientific communication is enormous, and so is the impact on public dissent. As we see with Silent Spring, books in a multimedia system have historically had the potential for far-reaching impact, launched from a privileged and protected position. Books like Silent Spring have enabled a single voice to reach not just those who happen on a tweet or a blog or a Facebook post, but the audiences of all forms of public communication, and to reach them with focused weight, credibility, and independent authority. Now, unarguably we have seen the considerable ability of the web to inform and to debate and, certainly, to mobilize, and particularly in recent elections. 
	Could a Rachel Carson of the 21st century, self-publishing on the internet, make the same difference that Silent Spring did in the middle of the 20th century? I can't answer that, but I can certainly challenge you all to figure out how exactly that would work. If you were a Rachel Carson now, how would you endow your Silent Spring with the same life? How would a dissenting environmentalist author of 2013 reach the full spectrum of the public to inform and enlighten them, to inspire them to act on what they've learned, and, finally, to keep that ruckus going for 50 years all the way to 2063? 
	Now, with any luck, I'll show you this. If it works, notice her wig, notice the exclusive focus on DDT, which is something that happened after the CBS reports. This is taken from a later show. Notice the kind of adulation at the end, which is the kind of thing that drove her critics crazy. 
Speaker 2:	Unless we do bring these chemicals under better control we're certainly headed for disaster. 
Speaker 3:	Rachel Carson, author of the landmark book Silent Spring started a revolution. During the 1950s when crop dusting planes and insect sprayers blanked plants with DDT, Carson warned of the dangers of chemical pesticides. She warned of science's power to alter nature and called for government action to protect its citizens. Because of her courage the disaster did not come to pass, and with Carson's words and spirit the modern environmental movement was born. 
Speaker 1:	Okay. I'd be happy to take any questions.