Communing with Nature

Continuing our series on History and the Environment, Thomas Dunlap explores the development of quasi-religious environmentalism in North America.

Any movement that brings people out to lie in front of logging trucks, risk jail by tearing up survey stakes, or risk life and limb by running a small boat in front of a whaling ship deserves the attention of historians. Environmentalism has always done that. It has roused particularly strong passions in the last forty years, since the denunciations of DDT that followed the publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring in 1962, and they show no signs of dying down.

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