File:Rachel Carson ecology - ecosystem.png: Difference between revisions

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Rachel & the Modern Environmental Movement

Planet Citizens, Planet Scientists

• http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/23/magazine/how-silent-spring-ignited-the-environmental-movement.html

• https://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/15332.Rachel_Carson

• http://www.cssd.org/webpages/eomara/files/rachel%20carson%20article2.pdf

• http://eloquentwoman.blogspot.com/2011/04/famous-speech-friday-rachel-carsons-new.html

• http://beinecke.library.yale.edu/collections/highlights/rachel-carson-papers

• http://library.uniteddiversity.coop/More_Books_and_Reports/Silent_Spring-Rachel_Carson-1962.pdf

At Chatham 1

At Chatham 2

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Rachel Carson, in her landmark 1963 speech “Our Polluted Environment” ... introducing the concept of ecosystem

(Rachel Carson, Lost Woods (Boston: Beacon, 1998), 230–31)

“Since the beginning of biological time,” she wrote, there has been the closest possible interdependence between the physical environment and the life it sustains. The conditions on the young earth produced life; life then at once modified the conditions of the earth, so that this single extraordinary act of spontaneous generation could not be repeated. In one form or another, action and interaction between life and its surroundings have been going on ever since.

This historic fact has, I think, more than academic significance. Once we accept it we see why we cannot with impunity make repeated assaults upon the environment as we now do. The serious student of earth history knows that neither life nor the physical world that supports it exists in little isolated compartments. On the contrary, he recognizes the extraordinary unity between organisms and the environment. For this reason he knows that harmful substances released into the environment return in time to create problems for mankind.

The branch of science that deals with these interrelations is Ecology.… We cannot think of the living organism alone; nor can we think of the physical environment as a separate entity. The two exist together, each acting on the other to form an ecological complex or ecosystem....

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It's all related...

It's All Related

PlanetCitizen

Environmental movement

Planet Citizens, Planet Scientists

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