Rachel Carson's Silent Spring antagonized some of the most powerful interests in the nation--including the farm block and the agricultural chemical industry--and helped launch the modern environmental movement. In The Gentle Subversive, Mark Hamilton Lytle offers a compact biography of Carson, illuminating the road that led to this vastly influential book. Lytle explores the evolution of Carson's ideas about nature, her love for the sea, her career as a biologist, and above all her emergence as a writer of extraordinary moral and ecological vision. We follow Carson from her childhood on a farm outside Pittsburgh, where she first developed her love of nature (and where, at age eleven, she published her first piece in a children's magazine), to her graduate work at Johns Hopkins and her career with the Fish and Wildlife Service. Lytle describes the genesis of her first book, Under the Sea-Wind, the incredible success of The Sea Around Us (a New York Times bestseller for over a year), and her determination to risk her fame in order to write her "poison book": Silent Spring. The author contends that despite Carson's demure, lady-like demeanor, she was subversive in her thinking and aggressive in her campaign against pesticides. Carson became the spokeswoman for a network of conservationists, scientists, women, and other concerned citizens who had come to fear the mounting dangers of the human assault on nature. What makes this story particularly compelling is that Carson took up this cause at the very moment when she herself faced a losing battle with cancer. Succinct and engaging, The Gentle Subversive is a story of success, celebrity, controversy, and vindication. It will inspire anyone interested in protecting the natural world or in women's struggle to find a voice in society.

Traces the path by which renowned scientist Rachel Carson came to write "Silent Spring", subsequently founding the environmental movement. This book presents the story of Carson's life and recognises that her work and studies incite major debates over the conflict of corporate interests versus environmental consciousness.

Throughout the twentieth century, despite compelling evidence that some pesticides posed a threat to human and environmental health, growers and the USDA continued to favor agricultural chemicals over cultural and biological forms of pest control. In Ghostworkers and Greens, Adam Tompkins reveals a history of unexpected cooperation between farmworker groups and environmental organizations. Tompkins shows that the separate movements shared a common concern about the effects of pesticides on human health. This enabled bridge-builders within the disparate organizations to foster cooperative relationships around issues of mutual concern to share information, resources, and support.Nongovernmental organizations, particularly environmental organizations and farmworker groups, played a key role in pesticide reform. For nearly fifty years, these groups served as educators, communicating to the public scientific and experiential information about the adverse effects of pesticides on human health and the environment, and built support for the amendment of pesticide policies and the alteration of pesticide use practices. Their efforts led to the passage of more stringent regulations to better protect farmworkers, the public, and the environment. Environmental organizations and farmworker groups also acted as watchdogs, monitoring the activity of regulatory agencies and bringing suit when necessary to ensure that they fulfilled their responsibilities to the public. These groups served as not only lobbyists but also essential components of successful democratic governance, ensuring public participation and more effective policy implementation.

These letters between the pioneering environmentalist and her beloved friend reveal “a vibrant, caring woman behind the scientist” (Los Angeles Times). “Rachel Carson, author of The Silent Spring, has been celebrated as the pioneer of the modern environmental movement. Although she wrote no autobiography, she did leave letters, and those she exchanged—sometimes daily—with Dorothy Freeman, some 750 of which are collected here, are perhaps more satisfying than an account of her own life. In 1953, Carson became Freeman's summer neighbor on Southport Island, ME. The two discovered a shared love for the natural world—their descriptions of the arrival of spring or the song of a hermit thrush are lyrical—but their friendship quickly blossomed, as each realized she had found in the other a kindred spirit. To read this collection is like eavesdropping on an extended conversation that mixes the mundane events of the two women's family lives with details of Carson’s research and writing and, later, her breast cancer. . . . Few who read these letters will forget these remarkable women and their even more remarkable bond.” —Publishers Weekly “Darting, fresh, sensuous, pleasingly elliptical at times, these letters also serve to tether the increasingly deified Carson firmly to earth—just where she’d want to be.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review) “It is not often that a collection of letters reveals character, emotional depth, personality, indeed intellect and talent, as well as a full biography might; these letters do all that.” —The New York Times Book Review “Provides insight into the creative process and a look into the daily lives of two intelligent, perceptive women whose family responsibilities were, at times, almost crushing.” —Library Journal “Dotted with vivid observations of the natural world and perceptive commentary on friendship, family, fame, and life itself, Always, Rachel will appeal to readers interested in biography and women’s studies as well as those drawn to nature writing and the history of the environmental movement.” —Booklist Online

Time is central to all that humans do. Time structures days, provides goals, shapes dreams--and limits lives. Time appears to be tangible, real, and progressive, but, in the end, time proves illusory. Though mercurial, time can be deadly for those with disabilities. To participate fully in human society has come to mean yielding to the criterion of the clock. The absence of thinking rapidly, living punctually, and biographical narration leaves persons with disabilities vulnerable. A worldview driven by the demands the clock makes on the lives of those with dementia or profound neurological and intellectual disabilities seems pointless. And yet, Jesus comes to the world to transform time. Jesus calls us to slow down, take time, and learn to recognize the strangeness of living within God's time. He calls us to be gentle, patient, kind; to walk slowly and timefully with those whom society desires to leave behind. In Becoming Friends of Time, John Swinton crafts a theology of time that draws us toward a perspective wherein time is a gift and a calling. Time is not a commodity nor is time to be mastered. Time is a gift of God to humans, but is also a gift given back to God by humans. Swinton wrestles with critical questions that emerge from theological reflection on time and disability: rethinking doctrine for those who can never grasp Jesus with their intellects; reimagining discipleship and vocation for those who have forgotten who Jesus is; reconsidering salvation for those who, due to neurological damage, can be one person at one time and then be someone else in an instant. In the end, Swinton invites the reader to spend time with the experiences of people with profound neurological disability, people who can change our perceptions of time, enable us to grasp the fruitful rhythms of God's time, and help us learn to live in ways that are unimaginable within the boundaries of the time of the clock.