Of Elvis and Rachel — and turning points

May 27 marked the 100th birthday of Rachel Carson, who died at a young 56. And soon enough, the August week will arrive to mark the passing of Elvis Presley who died 30 years ago and at an even younger age, 42.

Granted, on the surface there’s not much to connect these two characters.

Elvis, with his open hips, made teen girls think about biology. Rachel, with her award-winning writing on the environment, made the whole chemistry industry hopping mad.

At the same time Rachel was putting the final touches on Silent Spring, Elvis was in Florida shooting a movie in Yankeetown, north of Tampa, where he paid a visit to one of Florida’s most famous springs, Weeki Wachee.

Under the surface is where the spring waters join Rachel, Elvis and us.

In 1941, Rachel Carson published her first book, Under the Sea, establishing her reputation as a prescient writer able to connect for a popular audience how we are connected, ourselves, to nature that shapes us. Elvis was just a child.

Twenty years later, Weeki Wachee, on U.S. Highway 19, was one of Florida’s premier tourist attractions. Elvis was at the height of his career and television had just started casting its net wide into the world of color.

Weeki Wachee was one of the most magical sights nature had to offer within easy distance of a broadcast station. A few years before Elvis’ visit, ABC Broadcasting purchased the spring and its attractions. Not too long after, Disney would make U.S. 19 and its attractions obsolete. (In the 1990s, Disney purchased ABC.)

Today Weeki Wachee lives on, in memories as splendid and youthful as the young Elvis. But in 1961, nothing could have been further from the mass culture fermenting at Weeki Wachee than Rachel Carson’s dire warnings.

Carson had already won a National Book Award for The Sea Around Us. Were she alive today, she would have been equally captivated by what has happened to Weeki Wachee.

The spring and its waters are murky with algae, a symbol of both Florida’s past and present: the entire peninsula of Florida is swimming in a sea of nitrogen pollution, measured in parts per billion.

In Time magazine’s portrait of the 100 most influential Americans of the 20th century, Peter Mathiessen (a writer who brilliantly chronicled Florida’s natural past) wrote about the hostility Carson faced with the publication of Silent Spring: “A huge counterattack was organized and led by Monsanto, Velsicol, American Cyanamid — indeed the whole chemical industry — duly supported by the Agricultural Department as well as the more cautious in the media (Time’s reviewer deplored Carson’s ‘oversimplifications and downright errors’.)”

Elvis lives on, at Graceland and in the hearts of millions of aging baby boomers, and also in “sightings” that may have more to do with recapturing what we have lost in ourselves than Elvis, himself.

Today we can look back from Elvis, Rachel and Weeki Wachee and understand that the nature of commerce that pollutes the environment is grounded in changeable ownership.

The same motivation that compelled bitter hostility against Rachel Carson, despite her broad popular appeal, is just as evident in the corporations organized to oppose mandatory measures to combat global warming.

And that is no different than our own state’s failure to impose measures to stop nitrogen pollution — from lawn fertilizers, from dairies and farms, from cesspits and stormwater runoff from roadways.

The publication of Silent Spring was a turning point in public awareness and demand for change in federal laws protecting the environment.

Today, the Bush White House is attempting damage control in advance of a summit of world leaders on climate change. Some of our allies, Germany in particular, have a big head start on adapting energy policies to a new economy.

Is it any wonder that much of the world views America as a nation that is king, mostly, in its own imagination?

We still love Elvis for what he was, but Rachel Carson gave us a glimpse of what we must become: caretakers for what our careless touch can ruin.

In Congress, a Republican senator from Oklahoma has effectively blocked a measure to honor Rachel Carson, on the 100th anniversary of her birth.

If Congress won’t, then there would be nothing more timely than for the chemical industry to reverse course and acknowledge the contribution Rachel Carson made when it was youthful and filled with promise.

Florida environment: A wish list for 2007

To greet the new year, there are so many wish lists it is hard to know what to want. So let’s give it up for the environment, in no particular order, that:

Florida’s agencies charged with protecting public health and the environment shall abandon predetermined outcomes based on political expediency.

In the dark with gators and crocs

If you went to sleep and dreamt that environmentalists were being hounded and chased by the FBI because they advocated the conversion of lands owned by Big Sugar to Everglades restoration, you might call that a nightmare.

But you might not.

Answered prayer in Florida? Unexpected, unprecedented action from Bush

In recent years, Gov. Jeb Bush approved new measures that began to connect water supply and land development for the first time, providing a jot of hope to Floridians exhausted by the unabsorbed costs of growth.

Linkages, like the requirement for local planning to contain urban development within growth boundaries, are planned throughout the state. It is about time.

For a new state capital

Church is a good place for Sunday worship, but to contemplate the miracle of Creation, sometimes all you need to do is take a good walk.

The point of a good walk is obvious to anyone who has taken one. You start in one place and end up in another, even though you return where you started.

Which brings me to Tallahassee, a state capital so full of lobbyists you can’t do business without one handing you a towel when you finish.

Towering inferno

There is a good reason for the U.S. Senate to protect rules of debate on judicial nominees to federal courts: The people deserve to know what views are espoused by those who would help protect our constitutional rights.

For better or worse, confirmation hearings in the Senate are the place where one-sided arguments judged by politicians to be the prerogative of unconstrained power do not hold.

Seeing red in the Legislature

The Florida Legislature has a lot in common with red tides. It is easier to see when sunshine makes the toxins light up.

Today the Legislature is aiming to pass a bill to make it much more difficult for citizens to change the Florida Constitution by petition drive.

Scripps, the 30-year Treasury bond and global warming

Managing risk is the job of mothers and fathers, who hope their children will learn well and move forward productively into a challenging world. It is also the job of financial managers responsible for investments and depreciation schedules that measure asset value in decades. Risk is the connecting point between Scripps, the 30-year Treasury bond and global warming.

Heaven and hell in the Everglades

Clunk. That was the sound last week when a report on the Everglades by the National Research Council (NRC) hit the desk of Florida Gov. Jeb Bush.Of course, I’ve never seen the governor’s desk. I write from the other side of the castle keep and pole axes, outside the moat.

Safe sources of drinking water: Disguised in full

For most urban Floridians, water appears in faucets and disappears down drains as effortlessly as elevator music. It would be rash, however, to take for granted safe and affordable drinking water, the single commodity that dissolves class, race and religion.

The New York Times recently quoted an Iraqi about the good service provided by soldiers digging wells: “When this well is done, each time somebody takes a drink of water they will say the Americans did something good.”