War on Thugs!

This morning’s Philadelphia Inquirer featured a front-page article about Sustainable Living Roadshow’s contribution to the greening of this year’s Philadelphia Folk Festival. Bluegrass, meet Greengrass. A photo of Zachary Carson, donning a wide-brimmed straw hat, a full beard and that warm, beaming smile, accompanied the piece. We're thrilled that Zach and SLR has gotten the kind of PR we hope will precede us as we make new inroads into the American environmental landscape. It wasn’t always so, though, for Zach. As PI’s staff writer Sandy Bauer’s relates, “A few years ago, he had to pay to get into festivals. Then, organizers started letting him in for free. Now, they pay him to come.”

Some battles are fought uphill. So, it is with the environmental movement.

At the same time that the Philadelphia Folksong Society staged its very first folk festival, now in its 50^th year, an American marine biologist and conservationist named Rachel Carson, already renown for her writings on natural history, became a social critic when The New Yorker began serializing her soon to be published book, Silent Spring. Ms. Carson (no relation to Zachary Carson, at least bloodline-wise) is credited with launching the global environmental movement.

It’s now 2011 and we’ll still in hand to hand combat with forces that would place the pursuit of money above the health of Planet Earth and its citizens. Sometimes it seems that we’re swimming upstream, one that is invariably fowled with the effluence of toxic industry.

Which is precisely why the time has come to declare a War on Thugs. With people like Zachary Carson leading the charge, perhaps the hill won't seem so steep.