For the Birds
The Last Archive
Pushkin Industries
4.6 • 1.9K Ratings
🗓️ 9 July 2020
⏱️ 47 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In the spring of 1958, when the winter snow melted and the warm sun returned, the birds did not. Birdwatchers, ordinary people, everyone wondered where the birds had gone. Rachel Carson, a journalist and early environmentalist, figured it out — they’d been poisoned by DDT, a pesticide that towns all over the country had been spraying. Carson wrote a book about it, Silent Spring. It succeeded in stopping DDT, and it launched the modern environmental movement. But now, more than 60 years later, birds are dying off en masse again. Our question is simple: What are the birds trying to tell us this time, and why can’t we hear their message any more?
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Pushkin. |
| 0:10.0 | Imagine there's a place. Imagine there's a place... |
| 0:12.0 | Did someone leave a window open? |
| 0:15.0 | Imagine there's a place in our world where the known things go. |
| 0:22.0 | A quarter of the mind, lined with metal file cases, |
| 0:27.0 | stocked with dead birds lined up in rows, yellow, lime green, blue, flame red, like gems in a jewel case. |
| 0:37.0 | This place, this aviary, stores the facts that matter and matters of fact. It lies in a time between now and then. |
| 0:47.0 | The sign on the door reads The Last Archive. |
| 0:52.0 | Step outside to a house in the house. archive. |
| 0:53.0 | Step outside to a house in Silver Spring, Maryland in the year 1958. |
| 0:58.0 | Rachel Carson, a nature writer had just started work on a new book. |
| 1:05.0 | She hadn't decided what to call it yet, but she knew what she wanted to say. |
| 1:10.0 | People all over the country, bird lovers, noticed something in 1958. |
| 1:16.0 | When spring came, the birds didn't come. |
| 1:19.0 | The robins didn't come, the tufted titmice didn't come, the songbirds, the shorebirds, there were just very few birds. |
| 1:27.0 | Carson threw herself into a world of research, even though she was busy, exhausted. |
| 1:33.0 | She was taking care of both her adopted son, a six-year-old boy named Roger, |
| 1:37.0 | and her 89-year-old mother, who was dying. |
| 1:41.0 | Carson read and she researched all summer. That fall, the postman brought a package |
| 1:46.5 | to her door, a gift for Roger. It was a vinyl record. |
| 2:00.0 | American bird songs, volume one. Here are the songs and calls of 60 familiar birds as recorded in the woods, fields, and gardens of North America by the Laboratory of Ornithology at Cornell University. |
| 2:12.0 | Some of the birds are widely distributed. Others are |
... |
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