Environmental Visionaries | New England’s Gifts
If the earth could speak, it might offer words of gratitude to New England for inspiring the most persuasive environmental voices the nation has ever known. Perhaps, as some fear, the tipping point of the earth’s warming has already been reached—but that hasn’t silenced the indefatigable Bill McKibben, ardent environmentalist and lucid writer, who from […]
Rachel Carson
Photo Credit : © Erich Hartmann/Magnum Photos
Photo Credit : © Erich Hartmann/Magnum Photos
If the earth could speak, it might offer words of gratitude to New England for inspiring the most persuasive environmental voices the nation has ever known.Perhaps, as some fear, the tipping point of the earth’s warming has already been reached—but that hasn’t silenced the indefatigable Bill McKibben, ardent environmentalist and lucid writer, who from his Vermont home in 2007 launched 350.org, a worldwide organizing effort to galvanize political action on climate change. He’s the latest in a lineage that began with Thoreau’s dictum that “in Wildness is the preservation of the world” (“Walking,” 1862), followed by George Perkins Marsh’s book, Man and Nature (1864), called “the fountainhead of the conservation movement.” And then there was Rachel Carson, lover of the Maine coast, who upon learning from a friend on Cape Cod about the death of many birds there, researched DDT and other insecticides and pushed through illness to write Silent Spring. Her courage and her words catalyzed the modern environmental movement. “Therewould be no future peace for me if I kept silent,” she wrote in a letter. The noise she started has never been more needed than today.
Mel Allen
Mel Allen is the fifth editor of Yankee Magazine since its beginning in 1935. His first byline in Yankee appeared in 1977 and he joined the staff in 1979 as a senior editor. Eventually he became executive editor and in the summer of 2006 became editor. During his career he has edited and written for every section of the magazine, including home, food, and travel, while his pursuit of long form story telling has always been vital to his mission as well. He has raced a sled dog team, crawled into the dens of black bears, fished with the legendary Ted Williams, profiled astronaut Alan Shephard, and stood beneath a battleship before it was launched. He also once helped author Stephen King round up his pigs for market, but that story is for another day. Mel taught fourth grade in Maine for three years and believes that his education as a writer began when he had to hold the attention of 29 children through months of Maine winters. He learned you had to grab their attention and hold it. After 12 years teaching magazine writing at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, he now teaches in the MFA creative nonfiction program at Bay Path University in Longmeadow, Massachusetts. Like all editors, his greatest joy is finding new talent and bringing their work to light.
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