Silent Spring (1962)

Carson, Rachel

doi:10.12987/9780300188479-019

Cited by 413 publications

(501 citation statements)

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“…For example, residents spoke at length about the absence of certain birds and frogs compared to decades earlier, as well as garden plants germinating in the wrong season, or not at all. These descriptions from residents, whose daily rhythms are so implicated in their chemical surroundings, reminded me of Rachel Carson’s (1962) book Silent Spring , where she paints a picture of a polluted future devoid of birdsong. Residents had not only become ‘jarringly attuned’ (Shapiro, 2015: 383) to the fluctuations of chemical smells that regularly entered their homes and bodies, but also temporally attuned to the slow denigration of the local environment.…”

Section: Witnessing Slow Violencementioning

confidence: 99%

Slow violence and toxic geographies: ‘Out of sight’ to whom?

Davies

2019

Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space

177

126

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Toxic pollution is a form of violence. This article explores the gradual brutalities that communities surrounded by petrochemical infrastructure endure over time. Contributing to political geographies of violence and environmental justice, this paper puts the concept of 'slow violence' into critical comparison with work on 'structural violence'. In doing so, the paper makes two key contributions: First, it emphasizes the intimate connections between structural and slow forms of harm, arguing that structural inequality can mutate into noxious instances of slow violence. Second, the paper pushes back against framings of toxic landscapes as entirely invisible to the people they impact. Instead of accepting the standard definition of slow violence as 'out of sight', we have to instead ask the question: 'out of sight to whom?' In asking this question, and taking seriously the knowledge claims of communities who inhabit toxic spaces, we can begin to unravel the political structures that sustain the uneven geographies of pollution. Based on long-term ethnographic research in a postcolonial region of Louisiana, nicknamed 'Cancer Alley', this paper reveals how people gradually 'witness' the impacts of slow violence in their everyday lives. Finally, drawing on the notion of 'epistemic violence', the paper suggests that slow violence does not persist due to a lack of arresting stories about pollution, but because these stories do not count, thus rendering certain populations and geographies vulnerable to sacrifice.

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Section: Witnessing Slow Violencementioning

confidence: 99%

Slow violence and toxic geographies: ‘Out of sight’ to whom?

Davies

2019

Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space

177

126

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“…The linear, temporal flow forces the system to reduce complexities and lump them together. In the beginning, environmental efforts were simpler: preserve nature’s sublime (Bolden et al , 2018), conserve (T. Roosevelt and J. Muir), eliminate DDT (Carson, 1962) and ozone-destroying CFCs, pass the Clean Air (1970) and Water (1972) Acts and establish the EPA (1970). Then climate change emerged.…”

Section: Historical Political Examples Of Complexity Reduction and Ch...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Demoralizing: integrating J.D. Peters’ communication “chasm” with Niklas Luhmann’s (1989) ecological communication to analyze climate change mitigation inaction

Miller

2021

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Purpose The purpose of this paper is to explain the US society’s insignificant mitigation of climate change using Niklas Luhmann’s (1989) autopoietic social systems theory in ecological communication. Specifically, the author’s analysis falls within the context of Luhmann re-moralized while focusing on particular function systems’ binary codes and their repellence of substantive US climate change mitigation policy across systems. Design/methodology/approach The author achieves this purpose by resituating Luhmann’s conception of evolution to forgo systems teleology and better contextualize the spatial-temporal scale of climate change; reinforcing complexity reduction and differentiation by integrating communication and media scholar John D. Peters’s (1999) “communication chasm” concept as one mechanism through which codes sustain over time; and applying these integrated concepts to prominent the US climate change mitigation attempts. Findings The author concludes that climate change mitigation efforts are the amalgamation of the systems’ moral communications. Mitigation efforts have relegated themselves to subsystems of the ten major systems given the polarizing nature of their predominant care/harm moral binary. Communication chasms persist because these moral communications cannot both adhere to the systems’ binary codes and communicate the climate crisis’s urgency. The more time that passes, the more codes force mitigation organizations, activist efforts and their moral communications to adapt and sacrifice their actions to align with the encircling systems’ code. Social implications In addition to the conceptual contribution, the social implication is that by identifying how and why climate change mitigation efforts are subsumed by the larger systems and their codes, climate change activists and practitioners can better tool their tactics to change the codes at the heart of the systems if serious and substantive climate change mitigation is to prevail. Originality/value To the author’s knowledge, there has not been an integration of a historical communication concept into, and sociological application of, ecological communication in the context of climate change mitigation.

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“…Although concern for nature has existed in some form for millennia, it is only in the decades since Rachel Carson’s (1962) Silent Spring that environmentalism has come to prominence as a social concern (Griswold, 2012). With increasing awareness of the existential dangers caused by anthropogenic climate change, environmental concerns have risen up the political and cultural agenda (McCright, Dunlap, & Xiao, 2013).…”

Section: Ecosystemsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Positive social psychology: A multilevel inquiry into sociocultural well-being initiatives.

Lomas

2015

Psychology, Public Policy, and Law

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Although the field of positive psychology has made great strides in developing interventions for wellbeing, many of these are aimed at individuals, designed to engender adaptive psychological qualities and skills. As such, relatively little attention has been paid within the field to the socio-cultural factors that influence health and wellbeing. However, there is an emergent body of work that does focus on these factors, as summarised in this paper. Using Urie Bronfenbrenner's (1977) multileveled ecological systems theory as a framework, the paper provides an overview of socio-cultural wellbeing interventions and research at multiple levels of scale (microsystems, mesosystems, exosystems, macrosystems, and ecosystems). In doing so, the paper has two main aims: (a) to show how positive change in wellbeing can be affected by the strategic manipulation of socio-cultural contextual factors; and (b) to suggest ways in which the adoption of such a contextual approach can inform policy making.

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Silent Spring (1962)

Cited by 413 publications

References 0 publications

Slow violence and toxic geographies: ‘Out of sight’ to whom?

Slow violence and toxic geographies: ‘Out of sight’ to whom?

Demoralizing: integrating J.D. Peters’ communication “chasm” with Niklas Luhmann’s (1989) ecological communication to analyze climate change mitigation inaction

Positive social psychology: A multilevel inquiry into sociocultural well-being initiatives.

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