This house believes that Rachel Carson would not today have written Silent Spring. To second the oposition

摘要

In all of her books, Ms Carson wrote about ecological relationships and attempted to make them clear to an educated non-specialist. When a profile published in Nature in July 2007 claims that only now "ecology transforms into a more quantitative science" there must still be a gap between ecological science as it is practiced and the general scientific public's perception. Silent Spring brought ecological explanations to bear on problems of agricultural intensification. It found that government-sponsored pesticide application programmes failed to consider ecological relationships that had been demonstrated years earlier. Ms. Carson explained ecological relationships, drawing on substantial research from networks of scientists who often were her colleagues at the US Fish and Wildlife Service. She chose to excel in popular science writing rather than continue her own research career in the 1930s. She made an impact unmatched in the 20th century; it was intellectual as well as political. As Professor Stephen Toulmin said.