Real Leaders: Rachel Carson Seeds the Environmental Movement

HBR IdeaCast

Harvard Business Review

Leadership, Entrepreneurship, Communication, Marketing, Business, Business/management, Management, Business/marketing, Business/entrepreneurship, Innovation, Hbr, Strategy, Economics, Finance, Teams, Harvard

4.4 • 1.9K Ratings

🗓️ 12 March 2020

⏱️ 25 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In 1958, writer Rachel Carson began her exhaustive research on the effects of widespread pesticide use for her next book, Silent Spring. Over the next four years, she built up an airtight case showing how the world’s most powerful chemical companies were harming animals, plants, and people. Her effort was also a race against time, as she struggled against an aggressive form of breast cancer. In the second episode of a four-part special series on leadership, HBR Editor in Chief Adi Ignatius and Harvard Business School professor and historian Nancy Koehn trace the modern environmental movement back to Carson’s pioneering reporting and powerful prose. They discover lessons in how to strengthen your resilience, gather your energy and skills for a coming challenge, and why caretaking is an act of leadership.

Transcript

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0:00.0	When leadership advice feels like buzzwords and platitudes, it's time to get real.
0:05.9	HPR's podcast Coaching Real Leaders brings you behind closed doors as Muriel Wilkins coaches anonymous
0:11.9	leaders through raw honest career questions
0:14.6	that we all face.
0:15.9	Listen and follow coaching real leaders for free
0:18.3	wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to the HPR Idea Cast from Harvard Business Review. I'm Adi Ignatius.
0:34.5	This is real leaders, a special series that examines the lives of some of the world's most
0:38.4	compelling and effective leaders past and present and offers lessons to all of us today.
0:46.0	In our first episode we told the story of a Polar Explorer, today an environmentalist.
0:52.4	We've heard the benefits of pesticides.
0:55.0	We've heard a great deal about their safety,
1:00.0	but very little about the hazards, very little about the failures, the inefficiencies,
1:10.0	and yet the public was being asked to accept these chemicals, was being asked to acquiesce in their use, and did not have the whole picture.
1:20.0	So I said about to remedy the balance there.
1:24.0	That's Rachel Carson, speaking in a 1963 interview with CBS.
1:28.0	Her book, Silent Spring, has just been published and reveals the deep environmental damage
1:33.6	from the widespread use of synthetic pesticides like DDT. The reaction from
1:38.4	chemical companies is swift and forceful. The major claims in Miss Rachel Carson's book
1:44.8	Silence Spring are gross distortions of the actual facts. That's a
1:49.7	spokesperson for the chemical industry, Dr. Robert White Stevens, also speaking with CBS back in 1963.
1:55.7	If man were to faithfully follow the teachings of Miss Carson, we would return to the Dark Ages and the insects and
2:06.2	diseases and vermin would once again inherit the earth.
	...

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