People interested in the history of chemical health and safety may be interested in the podcast listed below. It does a good job of describing the cultural and political challenges that the scientific work Rachel Carson and others faced in the 1950’s and the value of DEIR approaches to these issues.

- Ralph

Silent Spring, 60 Years Later

https://radioopensource.org/silent-spring-60-years-later/

How’s to rescue the Earth from us people? Rachel Carson’s way – 60 years ago – was to write a book, and call it Silent Spring. She’d been a shy but defiant biologist in government service. Her book had science behind it, and the rhythm of poetry all through it: one woman’s outcry—as she herself was dying of cancer—against pesticides, most notoriously DDT, what she called “the chemical barrage” being “hurled against the fabric of life.” She was hurling her prose at not just DDT but Dupont, Monsanto, the big business of agriculture, and the slick ad slogan: “better living through chemistry.” Silent Spring became a historic bestseller and a rallying cry for the twentieth century. It’s an unmet challenge for the twenty-first.

Ralph Stuart, CIH, CCHO
ralph**At_Symbol_Here**rstuartcih.org

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