“I’m only a child and I don’t have all the solutions, but I want you to realize, neither do you!
You don’t know how to fix the holes in our ozone layer.
You don’t know how to bring salmon back up a dead stream.
You don’t know how to bring back an animal now extinct.
And you can’t bring back forests that once grew where there is now desert.
If you don’t know how to fix it, please stop breaking it!”
-Severn Suzuki, 12-years old, speaking at the 1992 UN Earth Summit
Communication Theory has one basic model: Sender > Message > Channel > Receiver. For the purists, when one engages in reciprocal communication the model expands to incorporate Feedback, Noise, and even, alternative channels–but for the sake of this post, we’ll emphasize the core principles of uni-directional communication. The power and effectiveness of what is being communicated is affected by each of these “steps”.
“If I had influence with the good fairy who is supposed to preside over the christening of all children I should ask that her gift to each child in the world be a sense of wonderso indestructible that it would last throughout life, as an unfailing antidote against the boredom and disenchantments of later years, the sterile preoccupation with things that are artificial, the alienation from the sources of our strength.”
-Rachel Carson
March is National Woman’s History Month, and this year Rachel Carson is being honored. Carson, of course, is the scientist who in 1962 wrote Silent Spring, the “classic that launched the environmental movement”, exposing the devastating effects of the chemical DDT on bird populations. This bestseller led to the banning of DDT, the creation of the Clean Water Act, and the forming of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Those of us who choose to eat organic foods have Rachel Carson to thank for exposing the potential dangers of pesticides.
To celebrate Carson’s legacy, 100 screenings of the newly released movie, “A Sense of Wonder”, will be held nationwide. This movie chronicles the last year of Carson’s life, as she battled cancer and worked to present her message to Congress and the American public.
