Rutgers University Green New Deal Environmental Response Paper Unit Group 3 Reading Assignment Total points: 10 Assignment Due Date: July 27, 2020 at 9:0

Rutgers University Green New Deal Environmental Response Paper Unit Group 3 Reading Assignment

Total points: 10

Assignment Due Date: July 27, 2020 at 9:00 AM Eastern Time, uploaded to Canvas

Unit Group 2 Readings:

Unit 6

Silent Spring is More Than a Scientific Landmark… Rebecca Renner, The Literary Hub

The Green New Deal Explained, David Roberts, Vox

Earth Day 1970… Lola Jusidman Shoshana, The Trouble

Is it Smoky in Here? The Clean Air Act in the 21st Century, Felix Barber

Unit 7

Why Natural Disasters Aren’t All That Natural, Chmutina et al., openDemocracy

Vulnerability to Natural Disasters ‘Soaring’…, Mark Tran, The Guardian

Unit 8

A Map of Where Your Food Originates May Surprise You, Jeremy Cherfas, NPR

Does Democracy Avert Famine?, Michael Massing, The New York Times

Is Fair Trade Finished?, Samanth Subramanian, The Guardian

Use the readings from Units 6, 7, and 8 to write a 1 page reading response on the following topic: With information from the readings and lecture, do you think the Green New Deal is possible? How do you think the Green New Deal will impact the way we approach environmental disasters? How do you think it will impact the way we approach our global food system?

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Video Assignment 3

Total points: 5

Assignment Due Date: July 27, 2020 at 9:00 AM Eastern Time, uploaded to Canvas

Unit Group 3 Video:

Using the following link, watch PBS NOVAS award winning documentary about the Flint Water Crisis and answer the associated question:

https://www.pbs.org/video/flints-deadly-water-pwsj3m/ (Links to an external site.)

In a quick paragraph- do you think events such as the Flint Water Crisis should be considered environmental disasters alongside hurricanes, floods, and fires? Using an example from the video (briefly) explain why or why not. 7/9/2020
Silent Spring is More than a Scientific Landmark: It’s Literature | Literary Hub
L I T E R A R Y
H U B
Silent Spring is More than a
Scienti c Landmark: It’s
Literature

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Silent Spring is More than a Scientific Landmark: It’s Literature | Literary Hub
On the Underrated Poetry of Rachel Carson’s Masterpiece
By Rebecca Renner
April 20, 2018

“

ere was once a town in the heart of America where all life seemed to live in
harmony with its surroundings.”
is is the surprising rst sentence of Rachel Carson’s
Silent Spring, the 1962 book that arguably sparked the modern environmental
movement as we know it. Rachel Carson was a naturalist and science writer whose
early work focused on oceanographic conservation. Her most famous book, however,
details the harm wreaked on nature and humans by the rampant use of chemical
pesticides. One of Silent Spring’s lasting legacies is the grassroots environmental
campaign that it stirred up, leading to, among other achievements, the phasing out of
DDT in the United States in 1972.
While most people have heard of Silent Spring, even if they don’t consider themselves
readers or environmentalists, many fewer have actually read it.
of-the-Month pick in 1962 and serialized in
ough it was a Book-
e New Yorker that same year, the
popular furor for the book has since died down, and it is now largely relegated to
textbooks or other educational contexts.
at is why its rst sentence is so surprising: Silent Spring does not read like a
textbook. It begins with a fable and is lled with lyricism and passion throughout.
Carson accomplished the feat of raising a public outcry against DDT not just with her
research on its deleterious e ects, but with the descriptive imagery, strong rhetoric, and
poetic language that lift Silent Spring into the realm of other great works of American
literature.

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Silent Spring is More than a Scientific Landmark: It’s Literature | Literary Hub
*
After the idyllic beginning of Carson’s fable, the fortunes of her American any-town
take a dark turn. “Some evil spell had settled on the community,” she continues.
“Everywhere was a shadow of death.” Animals are dying here, and so are humans. “It
was a spring without voices,” she writes. “On the mornings that had once throbbed
with the dawn chorus of robins, catbirds, doves, jays, wrens, and scores of other bird
voices there was now no sound; only silence lay over the elds and woods and marsh.”
She ends her introduction here: “What has already silenced the voices of spring in
countless towns in America?
is book is an attempt to explain.”
ough Carson’s use of this fable at rst seems out of place in what is ostensibly a
scienti c treatise, it’s a literary device that e ectively sums up not just Carson’s subject
but her treatment of it as well. She paints such an evocative portrait of the natural
world that the reader cannot help but sense the gravity of the environment’s presaged
destruction.
e fable signals that a plague of mythic proportions is afoot, but it’s real,
and Carson’s book is an attempt to reveal its true nature.

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Silent Spring is More than a Scientific Landmark: It’s Literature | Literary Hub
“Descriptive imagery, strong rhetoric, and poetic
language lift Silent Spring into the realm of other
great works of American literature.”
e poetry of Carson’s opening continues into the rest of Silent Spring.
ere is lyrical
language studded throughout the book; even Carson’s chapter titles—“Elixirs of
Death,” “Earth’s Green Mantle,” “
rough a Narrow Window”—are not what we
might expect for a work of dense scienti c research. But the places where Carson’s
artistry is more apparent are in her chapter introductions. She weaves her most vivid
images in the rst few paragraphs of each chapter, creating a more tangible experience
for the reader before transitioning into more complex scienti c writing.
In the section entitled “Realms of Soil,” Carson conjures a geologic history practically
in verse:
For soil is in part a creation of life, born of a marvelous interaction of life and
nonlife long eons ago.
e parent materials were gathered together as volcanoes
poured them out in ery streams, as waters running over the bare rocks of the
continents wore away even the hardest granite, and as the chisels of frost and
ice split and shattered the rocks.
en living things began to work their creative
magic and little by little these inert materials became soil.
You almost forget that she’s talking about dirt.
After describing the earth’s potential losses at length, Carson pivots the narrative,
showing nature in all its imperturbable force. In the beginning of the section entitled
“Nature Fights Back,” Carson notes humanity’s futile e orts at controlling the
landscape. She shifts into a series of examples with this light anaphora: “
something of the drama of the hunter and the hunted.

en we sense
en we begin to feel
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Silent Spring is More than a Scientific Landmark: It’s Literature | Literary Hub
something of that relentlessly pressing force by which nature controls her own.”
lines convey a sense of nature’s power from their structure as well as their meaning.
ese
repeated beginnings, coupled with the strong nal words—hunted, owned—propel
e
these sentences forward into the coming descriptive passage.
What follows is two pages of exquisite imagery:
Here, above a pond, the dragon ies dart and the sun strikes re from their
wings. . . . Or there, almost invisible against a leaf, is the lacewing, with green
gauze wings and golden eyes, shy and secretive, descendant of an ancient race
that lived in Permian time. . . .
en this vital force is merely smoldering,
awaiting the time to are again into activity when spring awakens the insect
world. Meanwhile, under the white blanket of snow, below the frost-hardened
soil, in crevices in the bark of trees, and in sheltered caves, the parasites and the
predators have found ways to tide themselves over the season of cold.
*
While she’s adept at translating the beauty of the natural world, the powerful emotions
Carson elicits with this imagery are rarely rosy. Not only is Silent Spring a descriptive
scienti c work and a great work of literature—it is also an accusation. She uses the
word “evil” 10 times, the word “sinister” six times, the word “su er” 35 times, and
permutations on the word death (including dead, deadly, die, died, and dying) a total
of 213 times.
e word “poison” alone appears 248 times. Given that my copy is just
short of 300 pages, Carson’s meaning is hard to miss.
She calls the use of chemical herbicides and pesticides a “chemical war” in which “all
life is caught in its violent cross re.” Carson isn’t shy either about what she believes has
led to this: “ . . . an era dominated by industry, in which the right to make a dollar at

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Silent Spring is More than a Scientific Landmark: It’s Literature | Literary Hub
whatever cost is seldom challenged. When the public protests, confronted with some
obvious evidence of damaging results of pesticide applications, it is fed little
tranquilizing pills of half truth.”
“While she’s adept at translating the beauty of the
natural world, the powerful emotions Carson elicits
with this imagery are rarely rosy.”
“As man proceeds toward his announced goal of the conquest of nature, he has written
a depressing record of destruction, directed not only against the earth he inhabits but
against the life that shares it with him,” Carson writes, calling on her readers to
question their part in this destructive past. “By acquiescing in an act that can cause
such su ering to a living creature,” she asks, “who among us is not diminished as a
human being?”

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Silent Spring is More than a Scientific Landmark: It’s Literature | Literary Hub
In all, Carson poses some 116 questions throughout Silent Spring, rhetorical questions
that, taken as a sum, nonetheless call the reader to action.
Who has made the decision that sets in motion these chains of poisonings, this
ever-widening wave of death that spreads out, like ripples when a pebble is
dropped into a still pond? Who has placed in one pan of the scales the leaves
that might have been eaten by the beetles and in the other the pitiful heaps of
many-hued feathers, the lifeless remains of the birds that fell before the
unselective bludgeon of insecticidal poisons? Who has decided—who has the
right to decide— for the countless legions of people who were not consulted
that the supreme value is a world without insects, even though it be also a
sterile world ungraced by the curving wing of a bird in ight?
Who indeed? Reading this passage, elegantly comprised of Carson’s most e ective
rhetorical elements, it is di cult not to question the destructive decisions of those in
power.
With a book full of passages like this, Carson gracefully cemented herself as both a
pillar of modern American literature and a herald of the 20th century’s environmental
movement. Her words are e ective and convincing, and more so because they are
beautiful. Silent Spring is clearly a tapestry patiently woven—with a cause worth
ghting for.
Rebecca Renner
Rebecca Renner is a freelance writer from Daytona Beach, Florida. Her work has appeared in The Paris
Review, The Atlantic, and The Washington Post. She is working on a novel.

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The Green New Deal, explained – Vox
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The Green New Deal, explained
An insurgent movement is pushing Democrats to back an ambitious climate change
solution.
By David Roberts @drvox david@vox.com
Updated Mar 30, 2019, 8:23am EDT
Sunrise Movement protesters urging Democrats to back a Green New Deal in late 2018. | Sunrise Movement
Update, 3/30/2019: Sen. Ed Markey (D-MA) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY)
introduced a Green New Deal resolution on February 7 that lays out the goals, aspirations,
and specifics of the program in a more definitive way. Read about it here, and read about
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The Green New Deal, explained – Vox
the criticism that followed here and here. The Senate voted the resolution down on March
26, but Ocasio-Cortez is now drafting a series of smaller, related bills. Our initial explainer,
first published on December 21, follows.
If the recent report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is to be believed,
humanity has just over a decade to get carbon emissions under control before
catastrophic climate change impacts become unavoidable.
The Republican Party generally ignores or denies that problem. But the Democratic Party
claims to accept and understand it.
It is odd, then, that Democrats do not have a plan to address climate change.
Their last big plan — the American Clean Energy and Security Act — passed the House in
2009 but went on to die an unceremonious death before reaching the Senate floor. Since
then, there’s been nothing to replace it.
Plenty of Democratic politicians support policies that would reduce climate pollution —
renewable energy tax credits, fuel economy standards, and the like — but those policies do
not add up to a comprehensive solution, certainly nothing like what the Intergovernmental
Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) suggests is necessary.
Young activists, who will be forced to live with the ravages of climate change, find this
upsetting. So they have proposed a plan of their own. It’s called the Green New Deal (GND)
— a term purposefully reminiscent of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s original New Deal in the
1930s — and it has become the talk of the town. Here are Google searches from the past
few months:
Google
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The Green New Deal, explained – Vox
For this story, I talked to wonks and political activists who are working on the GND, and
without exception, they expressed surprise at the speed and intensity with which both
media attention and activist energy have centered on it. There is a sense among those
involved that they have caught a tiger by the tail.
The GND push has thrust climate change into the national conversation, put House
Democrats on notice, and created an intense and escalating bandwagon effect. Politicians
(most recently 2020 presidential aspirant Cory Booker), advocates (most recently Al
Gore), wonks, and activists — everyone involved in green politics is talking about the GND.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez
@AOC
US House candidate, NY-14
…and we have #GreenNewDeal lift-off!
Never underestimate the power of public imagination.
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The Green New Deal, explained – Vox
4:07 PM · Dec 14, 2018
16K
3.1K people are Tweeting about this
But … WTF is it?
As we will see, the exact details of the GND remain to be worked out, but the broad thrust
is fairly simple. It refers, in the loosest sense, to a massive program of investments in
clean-energy jobs and infrastructure, meant to transform not just the energy sector, but
the entire economy. It is meant both to decarbonize the economy and to make it fairer and
more just.
But the policy is only part of the picture. Just as striking are the politics, which seem to
have tapped into an enormous, untapped demand for climate ambition.
When I think about the social status of the GND, I am struck by an analogy: It’s a bit like
concentrated solar power. (I’m an energy nerd. Sue me.) In a concentrated solar power
plant, large arrays of mirrors reflect sunlight onto a single tower, heating the fluid inside it.
The fluid transfers heat to water, the steam from the boiling fluid drives a turbine, and the
turbine generates electrical power.
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The Green New Deal, explained – Vox
DOE
The GND is the tower, and all the sudden, all the mirrors are aligned, focused on it. The heat
is building, the water is rapidly reaching a boil. Meanwhile, its owners are racing to build a
turbine.
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The Green New Deal, explained – Vox
There is immense potential energy in the GND, a concentration of social attention and
intensity. But converting that heat to power — to real results on the ground — will involve a
great deal of political and policy engineering, almost all of which lies ahead.
The GND has great potential, but then, American political history is a long story of wasted
potential, of waves of progressive enthusiasm breaking on the rocky shores of
Washington, DC, to no lasting effect. Whether that fate awaits the GND depends on many
things, among them whether President Donald Trump — the culmination of a history of
total Republican intransigence and ugliness the stretches over young activists’ entire adult
lives — has changed the political landscape enough that Democrats might leave behind
their long defensive crouch and voice some ambition.
Before jumping in, it’s worth noting that a number of great journalists have blazed the trail
on this story already. See, in particular: Kate Aronoff’s work, here and here but especially,
for the big picture, here; Hannah Northey and the crew at E&E are all over the daily
developments; Alexander Kaufman at Huffington Post keeps track of the politics; and
Rob Meyer at the Atlantic always has good thoughts. (There are no doubt many others I’m
forgetting.)
To get a handle on the GND, let’s take a spin through its history, the role it’s playing in
current politics, the effort to back it up with a real policy program, and the many, many
challenges facing it before it can become legislation.
The GND concept is not new
The first use of the term “GND” in the US may trace to New York Times columnist Thomas
Friedman, who called for one in a 2007 column (and in his book Hot, Flat, and Crowded)
as a kind of green globalism. (Funny thing, politics.) As Kaufman notes in a story on this
history, none other than Barack Obama was taken by Friedman’s idea and included a GND
in his 2008 platform. (It can also be argued that Obama’s stimulus bill was a proto-GND in
itself.)
Around the same time, in 2007, British economist Richard Murphy began discussing a GND
and founded the Green New Deal Group, which funneled some ideas to the Labour Party.
The UN also took up the idea, calling for a global GND in 2009.
But then Tories won in the UK in 2009, the Republicans swept the 2010 midterms, and the
idea mostly went quiescent, at least among politicians.
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In 2016, a GND became the centerpiece of the Green Party presidential campaign of Jill
Stein; indeed, a GND has been part of the US Green Party’s platform for over a decade. (It
is also central to the platform of the European Greens — see this study from the
Wuppertal Institute.)
Bernie Sanders’s 2016 campaign included a GND. And then, in the 2018 midterms,
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, now a representative-elect, took it up.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. | The Washington Post/Getty Images
But that capsule history of the term itself, the brand, somewhat sells short the intellectual
lineage. Many pieces of the GND have been worked on by many people over the years. The
constituent ideas — 100 percent clean energy; a just transition to a new, better economy;
massive public sector investments — are not new.
Talk of a “blue-green alliance” between labor and environmentalists, built around public
infrastructure investments and new jobs, goes all the way back to 2000 presidential
candidate Ralph Nader; real work has been underway at least since 2006, when the, er,
Blue-Green Alliance was established. The AFL-CIO has its own big infrastructure plan.
Van Jones wrote a book about green jobs back in 2008 and even worked briefly as an
Obama green jobs adviser, before a right-wing smear campaign drove him from the
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administration. The whole green-economy frame almost took root, but once the Dems
went on the defensive in 2010, it faded to the background.
In Washington state this year, activists ran a ballot initiative that coupled a carbon tax
with a GND-style program of investments, but, in the face of $30 million of oil money, it
went down to defeat.
Nonetheless, the basic GND ideas have persisted. And their appeal only grew as climate
warnings became more dire. They were in the collective water, like an ove…
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