Rachel Carson (1962): "When a scientific organisation speaks, whose voice do we hear – that of science or of the sustaining industry?"

For most of 1961, the American biologist Rachel Carson had locked herself in her cottage in Colesville, Maryland, to complete her book, Silent Spring. Serialised in the New Yorker during the summer of 1962, Silent Spring was published that September. It remains one of the most effective denunciations of industrial malpractice ever written and is widely credited with triggering popular ecological awareness in the US and Europe. At the Women's National Press Club, Rachel Carson denounced the links that had been established between science and industry. "When a scientific organisation speaks," she asked, "whose voice do we hear – that of science or of the sustaining industry?" The question remains as pertinent today as it did in 1962. Nor have matters improved. Neonicotinoids, insecticides used in seed dressing, have been linked to colony collapse disorder in honeybees, a condition that saw 800,000 hives wiped out in the US in 2007 alone. As Carson wrote: "Chemical war is never won and all life is caught in its violent crossfire." Attached is an article on the influence of Bayer Cropscience on Dutch policy makers (which appeared in the magazine "Vrij Nederland" on April 4, 2012)

Source: The Guardian/The Observer, 27 May 2012
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2012/may/27/rachel-carson-silent-spri…