Lest we forget, as the feisty environmental writer Michael Frome reminds us in his book, Rebel on the Road: And Why I Was Never Neutral, environmental reporting was sparse back in the early 1960s. Turner Catledge, then managing editor of the New York Times, was urged by one of his editors to create an environmental beat, but he dismissed the idea, saying, “When there’s a story there, we’ll cover it.” But the Times ran away from serious environmental coverage, ridiculing Silent Spring, Rachel Carson’s bombshell book on the dangers of pesticides, as a “wholly inaccurate” account that would “unnecessarily frighten the readers.” Time magazine took the same tack, assuring readers that accidental poisonings from pesticides were “very rare.”
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