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A Book That Changed Our Thinking

游客2023-09-10  29
问题                          A Book That Changed Our Thinking
                                                                    —By Karl Krahnke
The Book
    America in 1962 was still emerging from the comfortable decade of the 1950s, a time in which life generally seemed good and many technological advances of the previous twenty or thirty years promised a happier, healthier, and safer future. But clouds were on the horizon, and many of the questions and doubts that would characterize the decade of the 1960s were already apparent. One cloud that quickly became a major storm took the form of a book that was published in 1962, Silent Spring. Silent Spring is one of a few books that have changed history.
    Silent Spring is about chemicals, specifically about one type of chemical chlorinated hydrocarbons—and more specifically about one famous member of that group, DDT. Many people who have grown up since the 1960s have not heard of DDT, but before Silent Spring, and for a number of years after ward, DDT and its relatives were important tools in the civilized world’s at tempt to control nature through the use of technology and chemicals. DDT is a powerful insecticide and was used throughout the world to kill insect pests of all kinds.
    DDT had been discovered in 1939 and began to be widely used during the Second World War. For many years it seemed to be just one more miraculous product of modern science. DDT was used to destroy populations of many harmful insects, malaria-carrying mosquitoes, lice, and flies. There is no question that DDT and similar chemicals did, and still are doing, a lot of good. The danger from insect-carried diseases such as malaria and yellow fever has been greatly reduced, and the lives of many people have been saved and lengthened by their use.
    Silent Spring, however, told about the other side of DDT and its relatives. Using carefully collected scientific evidence, the author showed that DDT and similar pesticides had at least two dangerous side effects. One of these was the tendency of pesticides to kill all of the insects in the location where they were used. Not all insects are harmful, however. Many bees, for example, perform necessary functions, such as pollinating plants and even controlling the numbers of other, more harmful, insects. When useful insects are eliminated, the result has often been greater problems than before the pesticide was used. A second problem with chlorinated hydrocarbons is that they do not disappear quickly; they are stable chemicals that accumulate in the bodies of insects and the birds and animals that eat them and continue to do harm when and where the effect was not intended. Birds are especially affected by DDT-type pesticides. Many birds eat insects and worms as food, and the chemicals that were in the insects collect in their bodies, frequently leading to their death. As Silent Spring demonstrated so clearly, the disappearance of many kinds of birds was due to the presence of pesticides in their food sources.
    Most importantly, Silent Spring brought to the world at large the beginning of an understanding of modern ecology. We began to see that the natural world we live in is made up of a number of plants, insects, and animals, some good, some not so good, and that we cannot encourage or eliminate some without producing effects in many others, and even in ourselves.
    Silent Spring is a powerful book, beautifully and sensitively written, and it carries a strong message. It is full of complex scientific information, but it is equally a very human and caring book. It does not try to present a balanced picture or to find excuses for the mistakes we made with pesticides. It is an argument for a new and different way of looking at nature and our relation ship with nature. The book convinced many people that controlling nature was not always possible and was certainly not always a good idea.
The Author
    Almost as remarkable as the story of Silent Spring itself is that of the book’s author, Rachel Carson. Ms. Carson’s background and education did little to indicate that she would affect the public’s thinking about pesticides in such a dramatic way.
    She was born in Pennsylvania in 1907. Although she grew up in a family of five, she was especially close to her mother, who encouraged Rachel’s education and love of nature. The family’s house was in a rural setting, and Rachel spent much time getting to know the wildlife of the area. She also loved writing, and even before finishing high school she was sending stories and poems to magazines for publication. Not surprisingly, then, when Rachel Car son went to college, she began as an English major with plans to be a writer. She attended a small women’s college, Pennsylvania College for Women. In her second year, she discovered science and quickly changed her major to biology. As she explained, rather than losing her interest in writing, she had found what she wanted to write about.
    Carson graduated in 1929 and immediately went on to a graduate program at Johns Hopkins University. Supporting herself by teaching and working as a laboratory assistant, she finished her thesis and received a master’s degree in marine zoology in 1932. She taught part-time at several universities for a few years and then went to work for the U.S. government in 1936. Her first job was writing radio programs on marine life. These radio scripts were turned into a magazine article and later into a book, Under the Sea Wind.
    Rachel Carson wrote and worked as a government biologist for a number of years. Finally, in 1951, The Sea Around Us was published and was highly regarded by the public and by scientists. The book is simply a detailed description of the sea and the life in it, but it is written with the warmth and skill of a writer. Carson was given a National Book Award for her work.
    In 1955, Carson published The Edge of the Sea, a book about the shores of the oceans and the life on those shores. It, too, was extremely successful. By this time, Rachel Carson had gained a reputation as a wonderful writer with a deep knowledge of science, especially on matters related to the sea. She was liked and respected by scientists and writers, but she led a very quiet and private life away from publicity. She lived with her mother and her grandnephew.
    By the late 1950s, Carson had become interested in a more controversial problem, the effect that some attempts to control insects were having on wildlife, especially birds, and on humans. She began working on Silent Spring. Although many of the people she had contacted for information about pesticides and their use had warned her that the book she had planned would be controversial, no one was really prepared for the attacks on Silent Spring after it was published in 1962. The book was as popular as her previous books had been, but many critics, especially from the chemical industry and the government, called the book untrue and exaggerated. Angry reviews appeared in newspapers and magazines, and commentators on radio and television debated the arguments made in the book. During this time Carson remained largely quiet, although she made several calm and sensible responses to the criticism. Unfortunately, she had developed cancer several years earlier, and she eventually died of it in 1965.
    Rachel Carson gave us a precious gift. She changed our thinking about science and nature and how we interact with nature. She did it not just with fact and argument, but with writing that is as enjoyable to read as it is in formative. [br] She studies at Pennsylvania College for Women first with a major in ______ then changed her major to ______.
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答案 English/biology
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