A Brief Tribute to One of the World’s Most Brilliant and  Courageous Women – Rachel Carson – on International Women’s Day

“The 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

“In nature nothing exists alone.” – Rachel Carson, from Silent Spring

By Doug Draper, reporter and publisher at Niagara At Large

Posted March 8th, 2023 on Niagara At Large

This March 8th, 2023 is International Women’s Day and it is a time when I join many others, as we should not every day of the year and not just on International Women’s Day, celebrate women whose pioneering work has inspired us to build a better world for all

On this International Women’s Day one of the first women that comes to mind for this journalist and veteran reporter on environmental issues is American scientist Rachel Carson, whose book that shook the world, the most powerful and now legendary ‘SILENT SPRING’, set the stage for the first Earth Day in 1970 and what became known as the “modern environmental movement” and inspired people in Niagara (many of them women) and around the world to become leaders in fighting for environmental protection.

In 1963, the year after her ground-breaking book Silent Spring was first published,, Rachel Carson is featured on a cover of Time Magazine

When Silent Spring was published 60 years ago, in the fall of 1962, is became a bestseller but it also had those powerful concerns in the petro-chemical industry, in particular, to try to smear her as a communist and to try to have her black-balled as a professional scientist and writer.

Rachel Carson bravely stood up against this assault but tragically, just a few years later, she died of cancer.

So many others, including Margherita Howe, Niagara-on-the-Lake environmental leader and Order of Canada recipient Margherita Howe, were inspired by Rachel Carson’s call to action.

Her legacy lives on though, through so many of those inspired to fight for environmental protection, and that great book that forecast and warned against every environmental disaster from Love Canal in Niagara Falls, New York in the 1970s to the toxic railway car catastrophe in Ohio earlier this year, and the ignorance and arrogance around chemicals that impact negatively on our lives that has brought us to the current climate change crisis.

So on this International Women’s Day, here is to the courage and pioneering brilliance of the late, great Rachel Carson.

• Doug Draper, Niagara At Large

To watch at least the beginnings of a powerful PBS television American Experience documentary on Rachel Carson, click on the screen below –

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