Remarks by Ellie Goldberg, May 2007
I am glad to have the opportunity to honor Rachel Carson during her
Centennial Year. Rachel Carson taught me the most important lesson of
my life -- that our health is intimately connected and dependent on the
quality of the environment. Rachel Carson was not really an environmentalist;
she was an ecologist. She understood our world is our life support
system and that contaminating air, water and food was a violation of
human rights.
Rachel Carson had the courage, the confidence, the reverence for life,
and the sense of responsibility to speak out against widespread
pesticide abuse and environmental degradation. In fact, she wrote
about global climate change in 1948.
While all of Carson's writings stand the test of time, Silent Spring,
published in 1962, deserves special focus because it is a Call to
Action. Now, as the growing evidence continues to make the link
between illnesses at every stage of the life cycle and the
contamination of our water, air and food, we know that Rachel Carson
was right. Prevention is the imperative.
Rachel Carson inspires me to ask: What would Rachel Say? It is a clear
ethic for evaluating our public policies such as the state's continuing
permit of the widespread use of pesticides and even aerial spraying as
our families and communities experience growing rates of asthma,
cancer, reproductive and developmental disorders and in spite of the
loss of biodiversity, especially the pollinators.
The National Resource Defense Council calls Silent Spring one of the
landmark books of the 20th century. It points out how Rachel Carson
faced overwhelming illness and adversity, and in spite of an
orchestrated chemical industry campaign to discredit her work, she "rose
like a gladiator …motivated by her unabashed love of nature and sense
of responsibility." Thanks to Rachel, an enlightened public and their
legislators eventually created the US Environmental Protection Agency,
the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act.
Rachel inspires us to think of ourselves, not as whistle blowers or
canaries in the mine, but as guardians, steadfast sentries, and
defenders of our community. Thanks to Rachel we can see ourselves as
sentinel lions, the universal symbol of protection at the entrances of
cities, buildings, bridges... guarding the treasures of community.
In remembering Rachel, we can work together to foster a culture of
sentinel Lions who, like Rachel Carson, is motivated to take
responsibility for the health of their communities and to work for
sustained political and cultural change to make public health a
priority.
