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 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.