International Conference Silent Spring: A Woman, a History, a Future

Location: The conference will take place in virtual form on the e-learning platform of the University of Foggia

Conference Directors: Antonella Cagnolati and Giuseppe Nicoletti

Conveners: Università di Foggia, Rachel Carson Center

The conference is in Italian and English. 

Unheard prophets. In the history of humankind, scientists and intellectuals were criticized in various ways for their intuitions and their convictions, which undermined the foundations of atavistic and established certainties, often the object of disparaging press campaigns orchestrated by their detractors for purely economic reasons.

However, over time, these discoveries and intuitions have proved to be correct, and then they have begun to circulate in public opinion, generating movements that have seen their ranks swell day after day.

In our contemporaneity it is sufficient to refer to the figure of Greta Thunberg who has managed to bring the issue of climate change back to the center of the attention of the younger generations - and not only - or to the many activities that are multiplying more and more from below to clean up our planet.

An unheard Cassandra was surely Rachel Carson. The conference “Silent Spring: a Woman, a History, a Future” aims to recall her biographical profile and the battles she fought. Moreover, we would like to highlight the tenacious convictions she hold about the necessity of an epochal change in the Sapiens-Nature relationship that it would have, with increasing speed, determined (and we see it today in all its inexorable devastating force) the disappearance of animals and plants and endangered the existence of the human species.

The 60th anniversary of the publication of her best known book Silent Spring is the right occasion to reflect on what Rachel Carson, a woman-student of natural sciences-science popularizer, has left us as a legacy and, more specifically, on some issues (also taken up in Pope Francis Laudato Si') of extreme importance that require a thorough reflection:

1. Rachel Carson, scientist and popularizer;

2. Silent Spring: the impact of the book and the events of its publication;

3. the current battles in defense of the Planet;

4. (Integral) Ecology as a central theme in the formation of young people;

5. the testimonies of the territories;

6. the rights of the Planet;

7. the positive practices;

8. the relation between women and science.

Please find the program here. 

For more information click here.