A Pound Each Day

The Columbia Journalism Review piece under this link reminded me of how important great writing was to the environmental movement of the late 1960's, and how crucial it is to the future. Question-to-self on completing Marla Cone's essay, "The Unbroken Chain": how many TreeHugger readers have finished Silent Spring, the baseline for her essay? And, would a they grasp Cone's subtleties if not? It's a question that's hard to depersonalize, as Cone's work references her home town, site of one of the largest historic accumulations of PCB waste in the nation, the cleanup of which I long ago managed. Ms. Cone breaths personal immediacy in and exhales Carson's rational framework out, flowing them together very nicely in a modern context. Even if you've not read the legacy piece, her essay is, I think, quite accessible and worthwhile.

waukegan harbor fireworks.jpg As for the cryptic pound-a-day headline, here is the explanation. It's the order of magnitude at which hydraulic fluid and cutting oil containing PCB's went, for many years, into the harbor at Waukegan IL, leading to a controversial and expensive cleanup decades later. Those steady drips, backdrop to Carson's classic book and the the essayist's youth, still echo. "Don't Eat The Fish" signs frame rows of elegant yachts that symbolize more poise than poison. Relevancy demands reading.