Environmental Protection Must Be Our Top Priority :: Environment Earth Nature, pesticides, pollution

A few years ago, Time cartridge published a special discover entitled The Centurys Greatest Minds. It was the fourth in a Time series on the 100 most influential people of the century, this particular issue focussing on Scientists and Thinkers. On the cover, Albert Einstein is pictured on a psychiatrists couch, hands crossed over his chest, a depressed look cloaking his face. Dr. Sigmund Freud, seated in a chair near the couch, pen and pad in hand, is leaning in toward Einstein, excitedly waiting to perform some bit of psychoanalysis on the saddened scientist. A framed picture of Jonas Salk rests on the side table a portrait of John Maynard Keynes hangs from a nail in the wall. In the background, resting atop a bookshelf, is a stone bust of Rachel Carson, author of Silent Spring. She finds herself in quite excellent company not only on the cover, scarcely in the interior of the magazine as well. Carson was the only environmentalist and the only woman featured in the entire issue. Evidently, her impact in the world of scientists and thinkers was a tremendous one, and, as mentioned in Matthiessens Time article, her book, Silent Spring, is nearly 40 years later . . . still regarded as the cornerstone of the new environmentalism.1 Matthiessen goes on to write that one shudders to say how much more impoverished our habitat would be had Silent Spring not sounded the alarm.2 This is indeed a worthy claim by Mr. Matthiessen, but he correctly uncovers a bigger and more alarming truth when he says, the damage being done by poison chemicals today is faraway worse than it was when she wrote the book.3 In fact, since 1962, pesticide use in the US has doubled.4 As an environmentalist (or a radical environmentalist, as I am often designate by members of the mainstream environmental movement), I feel it is my duty as a protector of the Earths well-being to write this editorial as a means of transport into the American consciousness a variety of frightening env ironmental issues. Though some of you may be aw ar of these problems, I know many are not, and thus may be shocked to learn about the degradation of our Earth and the people living in it. Indeed, I truly believe that since the get through of the industrial age, America has behaved like an alcoholic with a good jobprospering despite a lifestyle that jeopardizes the future and ruins much of what is good with idle behavior.