THG 16 on 16 days against GBV: Tributes to Rachel Carson
Celebrating epoch-changing women as part of 16 days of activism against GBV. Plus one podcast and two short films themed on GBV.
All this week, I’ve been enticed by the depth and scope of Rachel Carson’s work which she accomplished during her tragically short life.
It all began with this podcast by Christopher Lydon full of wonderful and intimate stories about the personal life of Carson:
A troubled world is tuning in on Rachel Carson again, for lots of good reasons, and so are we. She was a hard scientist of the environment who could speak bluntly—about her masterpiece Silent Spring, for example: she called it the “poison book,” or sometimes “Man Against the Earth.” She was a common-sense crusader who won sweeping victories. She wrote high-flying prose about oceans before she’d seen one, and about the love of her life, as time was running out. Her opening chapters of Silent Spring can sound today, it is said, like “God calling the world into being” back in Creation time.
After that, I listened to the opening chapter of her wonderful book ‘The Sea Around Us’ in Youtube:
As I moved to another moving podcast by Mathew Side, the story of Sandra Bundy’s fight against mindless patriarchy was similar to Carson’s one. It felt as if the two women’s fight to hold the powerful men accountable for their deeds represented different parts of the same spectrum:
In the 1970s, Sandra Bundy was working hard at her job at the Department of Corrections in Washington DC. She loved her job, but just turning up to work was becoming unbearable.
Sandra’s male supervisors kept propositioning her for sex, asking her out on dates and making inappropriate comments. When she reported the problem to her boss’s boss, he tried to proposition her too. As the situation escalated, the language of sexual violence was used.
Sandra knew what she was experiencing was wrong, but she didn’t have the words to describe what she was going through, let alone try and seek justice.
I’ve recommended this earlier but the 16 days campaign makes this sublime short film—and educational material on how to deal with abuse and violence—doubly relevant:
I think, this one too is a good film that deals with the trauma of sexual violence well: