Books, etc.

Gentle Subversive: Rachel Carson

The Gentle Subversive: Rachel Carson, Silent Spring, and the Rise of the Environmental Movement, by Mark Hamilton Lytle.  Oxford Univ. Press, 2007.  x, 277 pages.  SHU Library: New Books QH31 .C33 L98 2007

This short book tells an intellectual, ecological biography of Rachel Carson (1907-1964), a founding writer of the environmental movement.  Lytle (who teaches history and environmental studies at Bard College) puts Carson into context in her time, and bases his text on wise readings of her books and carefully selected materials from Rachel Carson's papers at Yale University, in other collections, and comments in the literature about her.  Lytle never forgets Carson's patient care for her mother and the financial exigencies she faced, but also portrays the courage and stamina of a female scientist willing to take on major corporations in the time before the femininst movement.

Trained as a biologist and originally employed by the U.S. Bureau of Fisheries, Carson began to publish naturalist essays in 1937 in The Atlantic Monthly.  Her first book, Under the Sea Wind (1941) was reviewed well but sold poorly; she continued to write magazine articles while working for the Bureau and writing a biological history of the ocean which became The Sea Around Us (1951).  This popular and well-received book enabled her to move to Maine to write The Edge of the Sea (1955) about ecosystems of the North American north Atlantic coast.  Continuing to care for her relatives in Maryland, she began to investigate synthetic pesticides (especially DDT) and the harm they did to wildlife and the coastal ecosystems.

Carson began especially to study carcinogenesis (origins of cancer) which was beginning to be associated with synthetic pesticides at the National Institutes of Health; she was drafting the "cancer chapters" of Silent Spring when she was found to have cysts in her breasts, and underwent a mastectomy.  The cancer, however, had metastasized and Carson was in a race with cancer to write what she knew before was she realized would be her inevitable death.

Silent Spring found that synthetic pesticides are as crude "as a cavemans club" which simply kill everything they touch and release toxins into the ecosystem.  In fact she was "calling into question the paradigm of scientific progress that defined postwar America." (p. 166)  Corporate producers of synthetic pesticides fought back hard, calling her a subversive. Ezra Taft Benson, Eisenhower's (Mormon) Secretary of Agriculture, wondered "why a spinster with no children was so concerned about genetics" and labelled her "probably a Communist." (p. 175)  By April 1964 she was vindicated in stark terms: a massive fish kill in the Mississippi River was traced to the pesticide endrin that entered the river at the Memphis waste-treatment plant.  It was produced by Velsicol (now Eastman Chemical Company) a corporation which had tried to block publication of Silent Spring.  In that month Carson died.

Lytle provides context and nuance to this sad and heroic story.  She saw humans in the ecological web; her opponents saw (and continue to see) humans as masters of nature.  At the end of Edge of the Sea (1955) she writes,

What is the meaning of so tiny a being as the transparent wisp of protoplasm that is sea lace, existing for some reason that is inscrutable to us--a reason that demands its presence by the trillion amid the rocks and weeds of the shore?  The meaning haunts and ever eludes us, and in its very pursuit we approach the ultimate mystery of life itself. (p. 216)

--Gavin Ferriby

Featured Resource: Credo Reference

 

 

 

Credo Reference --This is information you can believe in.

Don't know where to start with your paper?  Down about a project coming up?  Credo Reference is a great place to start -- current, high-quality information with links to databases and resources available to SHU students.

Credo "topic pages" are a huge help: just type in a really general word, like democracy, photosynthesis, or terrorism --and the topic page at the top of the search results gives a basic definition, some related words, and links to journal articles, books, and images.  Click on the Concept Map link in the main menu and (after a pause for Java) an interactive, "live" concept map will open up with clickable links.

No wonder Smart Research Starts Here --with CredoReference.

The Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood

The Information: A History, A Theory, a  Flood, by James Gleick.  New York: Pantheon, 2011.  Sacred Heart University Library Z665 .G547 2011. 

In 426 pages Gleick maps the development of a concept, a property, and flow: information.  Just what information is, is hard to pin down: for this reason the book is properly The Information and that definite article is important: THE information.

Gleick's story really begins with Claude Shannon's work that bridge mathematics and electrical circuits in an obscure, technical article in The Bell System Technical Journal, July and October 1948.  Shannon clarified and quantified information as signal, bits, dots and dashes and electrical pulses, bridged by an abstract theory between knowledge and entropy, chaos, and uncertainty.  Shannon hardly cared what the bits meant, what could be resolved into meaning: he was concerned with quantified pulses, signals, loss, or distortion.  The process he discovered what the world runs on now, the fuel, the vital principle of our world.  By the time the physicist John Archibald Wheeler writes in At Home In the Universe (1994), "All things physical are information-theoretic in origin, and this is a participatory universe." (p. 296)  It is now hard to envision the world before Claude Shannon.

Information's maze-like permutations and unexpected entanglements, however, take the reader to Norbert Wiener's MIT, Kurt Goedel's Vienna Circle, and later the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, and Alan Turing's amazing years at Cambridge and Bletchley Park.  From the study of Babylonian cuneiform came a realization of ancient algorithms: instructions in starkly binary clay tablets.  Cryptograph contributed habits such as check-sums and other fail-safes to prevent the loss of signal, and in 1941 Jorge Luis Borges began his story, "The Library of Babel," with the phrase, "The Universe (which others call the Library) …." --the concept of the conceptual, ideational universe entangled with the physical, particle universe was born.

Gleick's book, like Douglas Hofstadter's Godel, Escher, Bach (1979), is hard to understand and exhilarating to read all at once.  Like Brian Greene's The Elegant Universe: Superstrings, Hidden Dimensions, and the Quest for the Ultimate Theory (2003), Gleick's book is both readable and at times utterly baffling.  This book requires patience, but rewards the reader with truly unexpected conclusions that are elegant, satisfying, and logically compelling.  This is the kind of book you should read while you're in college.

--Gavin Ferriby

The Reproductive Life-Cycle of Skunk Cabbage … Or the sex talk your parents never gave you

  Walking through the woods of Connecticut in late February or early March (depending on the winter), before spring has officially begun, it is not unusual to see colonies of Symplocarpus foetidus, more commonly known as skunk cabbage, popping through the ground even when snow or ice covered.  Before delving into the fertilization process, it may be helpful to have a little background information about skunk cabbage for those who may not be familiar with it. 

When looking at the web of life, plants form the base or the foundation of the web.  Somewhere towards the bottom of this lies skunk cabbage.  Skunk cabbage has been around for a long time.  Colonies can live indefinitely as long as they are left undisturbed.  Some colonies are believed to be as old as giant redwoods.  In order to truly appreciate the importance of skunk cabbage, it is necessary to examine it within the river or floodplain community of plants to which it belongs and to study its role within the river basin.  From this you’ve gathered that skunk cabbage grows in wet areas, especially near streams, ponds, marshes, and wet woods.  It is, as I mentioned already, one of the first plants to bloom, generating enough heat to melt any surrounding snow.  The heat and the strong odor (they really do smell like skunks!) attract insects, such as butterflies, bees, flies, and beetles, which pollinate the plant.  Skunk cabbage plays two important roles in the river basin.  They have an extensive root system which serves to hold the soil and help prevent erosion.  They also serve as a source of food and shelter for flies and other insects.  Medicinal uses of skunk cabbage have been reported as an antispasmodic, a diaphoretic, an expectorant, and as a narcotic.  It has been used to treat, with alleged success, asthma, chronic catarrh, chronic rheumatism, chorea, hysteria, and dropsy.

There are different variations of flowering plants.  Some, like the common alder, are Monoecious, which means that both male and female reproductive parts are in one plant, but separated into different structures.  This contrasts with Dioecious plants, like swamp maple and birch, which have male and female reproductive parts on separate plants.  Skunk cabbage is known as the perfect flower!  This means that it has both male and female reproductive parts in one plant in one structure.

The fertilization process takes place when a pollen grain germinates on the head of the stigma, sending a tube down through the tissue of the stigma and the style, discharging a male nucleus into the ovule, which unites with a female nucleus in the embryo sac of the ovule.  The ovule is thus fertilized, stimulating its development into an embryonic seed.  The coat of the ovule then hardens, producing seed, which then germinates to produce a new plant.

Hopefully this brief blog entry has awakened you to the awes and wonders of the skunk cabbage.  Next time you’re out walking or hiking in late winter or early spring, keep an eye out for Symplocarpus foetidus.  Take a close look and even give it a touch and you’re sure to feel the heat!

--Libby Knapik

Bibliography:

Bendre, Ashok M. and Ashok Kumar.  A Textbook of Practical Botany: II, taxonomy, economic botany, embryology, anatomy, ecology, physiology, biostatistics, cytology and genetics.  Rev. ed.  Meerut, India: Rastogi Publications, 2010. E-book.

Holdrege, Craig.  “Skunk Cabbage (Symplocarpus foetidus).”  In Context #4 (Fall, 2000): 12-18. Print.

Runkel, Sylvan T. and Alvin F. Bull.  Bur Oak Guide: wildflowers of Iowa woodlands. 2nd ed.  Iowa City, IA: University of Iowa Press, 2009. Print

Winters, Chris.  “A Brief Life History Study of Skunk Cabbage.”  New York State Flora Association Newsletter 3:4-5. Print.

Library: An Unquiet History

Library: An Unquiet History.  By Matthew Battles.  New York: Norton, 2003.  x, 244 pages.  Sacred Heart University Library Z721.B28 2003

Battles doesn't just read in the library, he reads the library --the social arrangement which not only preserves the cultural record, but becomes part of the cultural record itself.  This history is unquiet, because all libraries are subject to change and decay.  The larger and more famous the library, the greater likelihood that it will be destroyed, in the long run.  

The greatest legendary library in history, the Library of Alexandria, likely decayed and died not only from causes of war, but cultural change --people (Christians, Muslims, merchants, others) simply stopped caring what was in it,  their libraries "moldering slowly through the centuries as people grew indifferent and even hostile to their contents." (p. 32)  Battles uses the word biblioclasm to meant not just the random destruction of certain books, but the wholesale destruction of the cultural record as a reflection of and means to power. 

The funny thing is, books don't burn all that well --a fact discovered early by the first august emperor of China, Shi Huangdi (259-210 BCE), by Savanarola in Renaissance Florence, and by Goebbels, Rosenberg, and other Nazis.  Many of Battles' accounts of biblioclasm are moving: the repeated destruction of the priceless library of the University of Louvain, 1914 and 1940 (furore teutonico diruta indeed), and the Vilna ghetto library, 1943 --a remarkable coincidence of librarianship and resistance.  But all that packed paper makes for a slow fire.

Battles' book is readily accessible to non-specialist readers and broadly suggests that the current attitude of educated contempt towards pre-digital learning is a prelude to its destruction.  Libraries, for all the cultural sanctimoniousness of Melville Dewey, are home both to civilization, its discontents, and its malcontents.  Matthews' own battles continue in the blog HiLoBrow --see also bookfuturism

--Gavin Ferriby