Articles & Essays on the Environment 

What is our responsibility to the natural environment?

Central Essay

Rachel Carson, from Silent Spring 

There was a strange stillness. The birds, for example — where had they gone? Many

people spoke of them, puzzled and disturbed. The feeding stations in the backyards

were deserted. The few birds seen anywhere were moribund; they trembled violently

and could not fly. It was a spring without voices.

Classic Essay

Ralph Waldo Emerson, from Nature 

The lover of nature is he whose inward and outward senses are still truly adjusted to

each other; who has retained the spirit of infancy even into the era of manhood.

Other Voices

Aldo Leopold, from The Land Ethic

It is inconceivable to me that an ethical relation to land can exist without love,

respect, and admiration for land, and a high regard for its value. By value, of course

I mean something far broader than mere economic value; I mean value in the

philosophical sense.

Lewis Thomas, Natural Man 

We still argue the details, but it is conceded almost everywhere that we are not the

masters of nature that we thought ourselves; we are as dependent as the leaves or

midges or fish on the rest of life. We are part of the system.

A purely personal effort is, of course, just a gesture — a good gesture, but a gesture.

The greenhouse effect is the first environmental problem we can’t escape by moving to

the woods. There are no personal solutions.

Terry Tempest Williams, The Clan of One-Breasted Women 

Most statistics tell us breast cancer is genetic, hereditary, with rising percentages

attached to fatty diets, childlessness, or becoming pregnant after thirty. What they

don’t say is that living in Utah may be the greatest hazard of all.

Joy Williams, Save the Whales, Screw the Shrimp 

A picture of a poor old sea turtle with barnacles on her back, all ancient and exhausted, depositing her five gallons of doomed eggs in the sand hardly fills you with joy, because you realize, quite rightly, that just outside the frame falls the shadow of the condo. What’s cropped from the shot of ocean waves crashing on a pristine shore is the plastics plant, and just beyond the dunes lies a parking lot.

E. O. Wilson, from The Future of Life 

But wilderness always gives way to civilization, doesn’t it? That is progress and the

way of the world, and we can’t do much about it.

Poetry

Gerard Manley Hopkins, Inversnaid 

Visual Text

Robert Crumb, A Short History of America (cartoon) 

Royal Dutch/Shell, Let’s Go (advertisement)