3/12/12

Silent Spring at 50: The Legacy of Rachel Carson 

There is shocking footage of children happily playing about in the wake of DDT-spraying vehicles trolling the new suburban streets of postwar America. If it weren’t for work by pioneering environmental activists like Rachel Carson, such government programs would have left far more devastating wreckage in their callous path than they did.

It was 50 years ago that Carson first published her seminal treatise Silent Spring, chronicling how an industrialized society’s broad and indiscriminate use of chemicals and pesticides can cause irrevocable health and environmental damage. Such brave work eventually led to lasting changes in U.S. law, strictly governing the use of such substances. For its 17th-annual symposium, the Wallace Stegner Center will take an in-depth look at the lasting legacy of both Carson’s work and the environmental movement that followed in the wake of her eye-opening labors. (Jacob Stringer)

Mar 9, 2012, 8 pm  
Download the brochure

10 Fort Douglas Boulevard, Salt Lake City, UT 84113, United States (801) 587-1000, Salt Lake City, 84102,
801-587-2980
Where: University Guest House & Conference Center

Silent Spring at 50: The Legacy of Rachel Carson @ Fort Douglas Ballroom, 110 S. Fort Douglas Blvd., 801-585-3440, March 9-10, $100-$175. www.Law.Utah.edu/Stegner
Download the brochure  Speakers include: Susan Avery, President and Director, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution; Terrence Collins, Senior Institute Member, The Institute for Green Science, Carnegie Mellon University; Robin Craig, Attorneys’ Title Professor of Law, Associate Dean for Environmental Programs, and Co-Director of the Environmental and Land Use Law Program, Florida State University College of Law; Paul Holthus, founding Executive Director, World Ocean Council; Rowan Jacobsen, author of Fruitless Fall and other books; Priscilla Murphy, Author of What a Book Can Do: The Publication and Reception of Silent Spring; Naomi Oreskes, Professor of History and Science Studies, University of California, San Diego and author of Merchants of Doubt; Sandra Steingraber, Ecologist and author of Living Downstream: An Ecologist’s Personal Investigation of Cancer and the Environment and other books; Wendy Wagner, Joe A. Worsham Centennial Professor, School of Law, University of Texas at Austin, and the production of “Air Tight,” a play by Aden Ross.