For Your Journal: Writing Prompt

Do you keep a journal – or wish you could get one started? Literary Mama wants to help. Several times a month, we’ll post a writing prompt. Open a notebook and write for 10 minutes. Don’t worry about grammar or punctuation – just write. 

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Happy Earth Day!

In 1962 Rachel Carson published Silent Spring and redefined human understanding of the environment around us. Her book, which discusses synthetic chemical pesticides and how they wreak havoc on the planet and all its living inhabitants, created uproar on a national level. Eventually, even President John F. Kennedy got involved and ordered the President’s Science Advisory Committee to look into the book’s details. Carson’s thorough and in-depth information led to the banning of DDT, a serious discussion about chemicals and what they do to the environment, and the new idea that humans can and do unquestionably affect planet earth.

Not long later, on April 22, 1970, Earth Day was established. This celebration of environmental awareness seemed to capture the growing sentiment that humans are a part of the earth as the earth is a part of us. The Earth Day Network calls the creation of Earth Day “the birth of the modern environmental movement.” Carson’s book was not the only factor in the growing consciousness of the time, but it surely was a powerful force.

 

In your journal today, write how, if at all, you think that Carson’s Silent Spring has affected your life, fifty years after it’s publication? Will you celebrate Earth Day? How?

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Do you have a writing prompt to share with Literary Mama readers? Send your 150- to 300-word narrative and associated writing prompt to lmblogeditor (at) literarymama (dot) com. We’d love to read your ideas!