美文欣赏 No More Silent Spring

　　No More Silent Spring

　　Rachel Carson was a scientist and a bird watcher. She noticed, in the late 50s, the gradual disappearance of some birds, and linked it to our use of pesticides. She wrote a book about her fear that robins would sing no more in future spring times. She called it Silent Spring. With that revolutionary book, Rachel Carson launched the environmental movement, a force that has swept the world.

　　Rachel: Humans have now acquired a fateful power to alter and to destroy nature. But man is a part of nature, and his war against nature is inevitably a war against himself.

　　Journalist: What do you think, just in an overview, the effect that this woman’s work has had on this country, and the world?

　　Interviewee: Her work helped to produce the first Earth Day.

　　TV: Earth Day -- we can see what we all have in common: our planet!

　　Interviewee: The clean water act, the clean air act, the super fund, some of these were indirect results, but all of them stemmed from the new awareness that was born as a result of Silent Spring’s publication. In that century’s end, environmental challenges round the world make Carson’s words all the more timely: rain forest in danger, animal species dying up, people choking on pollution, from Eastern Europe to China.

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