Earth Days Page #2

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that's much more insidious

with things

that are not so visible

and nevertheless

have dramatic impacts.

Like nuclear fallout

from atmospheric nuclear tests.

When I was born,

Strontium-90 didn't exist.

By the time I was a teenager,

every living creature

on the planet had Strontium-90

in its bones or its shells.

That's a fairly

profound change...

...and we'd done it.

It felt to me

like the preciousness of life

was imperiled.

Subconsciously,

I may have understood

that my way of life, you know,

the sort of middle class

American way of life,

was imperiled.

I couldn't have

articulated it then

'cause I didn't understand

all the connections.

Bear in mind that,

as a child, I was,

you know, trained

to hide under my desk

in the event

of a nuclear explosion.

Living with the possibility

of the bomb

is foundational to this idea

that human extinction has been

put within human grasp.

The mushroom cloud

was the icon of my generation.

That image was

in every classroom

I went to as a child.

It was the epitome

of human creation and creativity

to have developed this

incredibly destructive thing.

And then, of course, there was

the light side of the shadow.

You know, there was this idea

that was out there

that the atom was going to be

the salvation of humanity.

This was the first generation

that had acquired

the power

of a geophysical force

that could cause brand-new

radioactive substances

to be disseminated

throughout the entire planet.

That could drive, not just a few

species as we'd always done,

but now literally thousands

of species into extinction.

That could change the climate.

We've been on this planet

for several hundred thousands

of years,

and during most of that time,

anybody who looked far

into the future

didn't have much survival value.

I mean, if you're

in the midst of a battle

with a mammoth or something,

you don't sit there and say,

"Well, let's think

about three years from now."

You-You run.

And so,

for a long period of time,

the advantage went to those

who focused

on the immediate situation.

And I think,

as a consequence of that,

now that we are faced

with issues

which will really unfold

over centuries,

we're genetically

and institutionally

ill-adapted for it.

The concept

that the planet is very fragile

really came out

of Rachel Carson's book.

Silent Spring sounded the alarm

that we were destroying

the life support system

of the planet.

The book was a sensation.

It was printed

in over 30 languages.

Rachel Carson

has to get the main credit

for the modern

environmental movement

because she was the first one

to point out one of the really

serious environmental problems

that was the overuse

of pesticides.

It was the right moment,

the right book

and the right personality.

Although the pesticide industry

tried to demonize her,

Rachel Carson

didn't demonize easily.

Unless we do bring these

chemicals under better control,

we are certainly headed

for disaster.

The balance of nature is built

of a series

of interrelationships

between living things,

and between living things

and their environment.

You can't just step in

with some brute force

and change one thing

without changing many others.

Now this doesn't mean,

of course,

that we must never interfere,

that we must not attempt

to tilt that balance of nature

in our favor,

but when we do make

this attempt,

we must know what we're doing.

We must know the consequences.

There was an ugly backlash

after the book came out.

The chemical industries were

calling her a hysterical woman

that didn't know

what she was talking about.

The major claims

in Ms. Rachel Carson's book

Silent Spring

are gross distortions

of the actual facts,

completely unsupported

by scientific

experimental evidence,

and general practical experience

in the field.

Ms. Carson maintains

that the balance of nature

is a major force

in the survival of man,

whereas the modern chemist,

the modern biologist,

the modern scientist

believes that man

is steadily controlling nature.

Something that

we all thought of prior to her

as better living through

chemistry in a sense--

you're pouring this

stuff on your crops

and you're producing more crops

and it really was not

something that you thought,

"My goodness,

people are intentionally

poisoning the environment."

And that those poisons

might not be as selective

as they're telling us.

Rachel Carson was

incredibly scrupulous

in the creation

of Silent Spring.

She understood that we are

organisms as much as the birds

whose songs were being silenced.

She wrote not only

a tremendously informative book,

but, uh, an incredibly

moving book,

and she did it while

she was suffering from cancer.

There was a controversy

that raged

really until her death

it was still going on,

and that was kind of sad

because, uh, she

was a shy person.

She was not a crusader.

She was a scientist.

There appears to be growing

concern among scientists

as to the possibility

of dangerous,

long-range side effects

from the widespread use

of DDT and other pesticides.

President Kennedy's

science advisory group

reported that Rachel Carson's

method of research

was sound and her findings

and conclusions

were generally correct.

President Kennedy

backed Rachel Carson.

I think, particularly,

of course since Ms. Carson's book...

And that put the chemical

industry on the defensive.

I truly believe that we,

in this generation,

must come to terms with nature.

And I think we are challenged

as mankind has never

been challenged before

to prove our maturity

and our mastery,

not of nature, but of ourselves.

A really profound difficulty

that we confront,

particularly in the West,

is the degree to which people

came to equate the

accumulation of material goods

with success and happiness.

It hasn't always been like that.

The things we have to do

to accumulate more goods

tends to deteriorate the

quality of the social system.

So, as we get less

and less satisfaction

from the social

side of our lives,

we actually tend to put

more and more emphasis

on the accumulation

of material goods.

When I was 19,

I took off and hitchhiked

around the world

for a few years.

I was just profoundly depressed

by the, the many ways

that America was falling short

of the American dream

that I had been taught

in my younger years.

In January of 1965,

I find myself in Namibia

in the middle of a desert.

I was hungry; I was tired,

I had been alone

for a couple of years,

and had, in essence,

sort of a vision.

The things that came together

in my mind at that point

were the human problems

we were facing

and the principals of ecology

that guided literally

everything on Earth.

Ecology is in

some large measure,

the study of how populations

obtain and use energy

efficiently.

Energy from the sun,

through their food supplies.

And because humans

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