4. Rachel Carson, Terry Tempest Williams, and Ecological Empathy

2019 ◽  
pp. 123-161
Author(s):  
David K. Skelly

This chapter presents two examples to demonstrate that natural history is the necessary basis of any reliable understanding of the world. More than a half century ago, Rachel Carson revolutionized the public’s view of pesticides. The foundation of her success was the careful use of natural history data, collated from across North America. The examples she assembled left little doubt that DDT and other pesticides were causing a widespread decline in birds. More recently, the case for the impact of atrazine on wildlife was based on laboratory experiments, without the advantage of natural history observations. For atrazine, natural history observations now suggest that other chemical agents are more likely to be responsible for feminization of wildlife populations. Developing expectations for scientists to collect natural history information can help to avoid over-extrapolating lab results to wild populations, a tendency often seen when those lab results conform to preconceptions about chemicals in the environment.


2004 ◽  
Vol 58 (2) ◽  
pp. 90
Author(s):  
Deborah Weagel ◽  
Katherine R. Chandler ◽  
Melissa A. Goldthwaite

2017 ◽  
Vol 8 (1-IT) ◽  
Author(s):  
Mario Tanga ◽  
Giacomo Gelati ◽  
Marco Casazza

6Contemporary science and culture show more and more extended and meaningful signs about the increasing explaining power of evolutionary paradigm. This power overcomes the field of the history of living species. We consider “On the Origin of Species” of 1859 by Charles Darwin as the establishment of this paradigm, but this original and fruitful idea has received the several and different contributions from near and (seemingly) far scientific fields. This process happened according distinguishable waves and leaded the evolutionary theory very far from its starting point, making it something wider and different. The current knowledge of this theory involves many kinds of scholars: biologists, zoologists, botanists, development biologists, genetics/genomics scholars and also scholars of many other disciplines, as statistics, mathematics, ecology, environmental sciences, physics, chemistry, linguistics, sociology, neuro-sciences, epidemiology, informatics, immunology. During the end of XX Century, the study of complexity, of self-organization and of emerging properties has been a decisive factor to extend evolution until beyond the boundaries of Biology. These phenomena, or properties, or features, that are shown by “living” and “not-living” systems (so called basing ourselves on traditional definitions), have deeply modified even the “properly” biologic evolution itself and besides this has demonstrated that, mutatis mutandis, evolutionary processes or phenomena happen also out of biologic dominion, referring “biologic” to “wet-ware world”. This is to say the class of evolutionary phenomena is more widely and more inclusively extended than our opinion. We can mean this as a revolution (according to Kuhn’s definition) that imposes us to restructure the definition of evolution itself and even to redraw the boundaries and the map of Biology itself. Aiming to establish a name of this field of study we propose “PanEvolutionary Theory” (PanEvo Theory). No doubt Prigogine offered an important contribution to this area. The thinking and the work of Enzo Tiezzi can be placed seen in the same perspective. Disregarding direct connections and contacts with the Nobel Prize Prigogine, however the studies of Enzo Tiezzi are neither a fully unexpected work nor a theory lacking of important potentialities: it is not a strange or eccentric academic exercise. Except the close contact and the dense exchanges with Prigogine, we collocate Enzo Tiezzi in the same context of Gregory Chaitin, of Rachel Carson, of John Harte and Robert H. Socolow, of James Paul Wesley, of Sertorio, of Oort and Peixoto, just to cite the most strictly related. Our Academy had the privilege and the honor of having Enzo Tiezzi in its ranks. We think that merits and developments of the thinking of this scholar have to produce important and lasting fruits in the future.


2020 ◽  
Vol 37 (3) ◽  
pp. 1147-1172
Author(s):  
Alana Tamires Fernandes de Souza ◽  
André Ferrer Pinto Martins
Keyword(s):  

Após ser definida como palavra do ano em 2016 pelo dicionário Oxford, a pós-verdade tem despertado a atenção de pesquisadores interessados em entender qual a origem desse fenômeno e quais as suas implicações políticas e sociais na atualidade e no futuro. Ao afirmar que a pós-verdade é “relativo a, ou denota circunstâncias nas quais fatos objetivos são menos influentes em moldar a opinião pública do que apelos à emoção e crença pessoal”, o dicionário Oxford abre uma lacuna para que busquemos entender como a dicotomia “fatos objetivos” versus “aspectos subjetivos ou emocionais” pode refletir os interesses do contrato modernista das ciências na busca da verdade. Para isso, recorremos ao caso histórico representado pela vida e obra da bióloga norte-americana Rachel Carson (1907-1964) que, ao publicar seu livro Primavera Silenciosa em 1962, foi acusada de irracional, emotiva e considerada pseudocientista. A partir deste caso e estabelecendo paralelos com a discussão atual sobre a utilização dos agrotóxicos no Brasil, buscamos evidenciar como a mobilização dos afetos pode ser utilizada para despertar o interesse do público para uma temática. Por fim, discutimos como essa mobilização dos afetos pode contribuir para um ensino de ciências comprometido em perceber a prática científica também permeada por aspectos da subjetividade intrínseca ao ser humano.


Author(s):  
Peter G. Wells

Marking the 50th anniversary of the publication of 'Silent Spring' written by Rachel Carson.


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