Gifts from nature: Healthy waters

She helps get it from forest to your faucet, but Mother Nature needs your help to continue providing clean water for people and wildlife. 

A project at Sedgeunkedunk Stream in Maine removed a dam and restored natural water functions. Credit: Meagan Racey/USFWS

 
During this season of holiday giving, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service would like to take time and reflect on the gifts we receive throughout the year from Mother Nature. Gifts of Nature are treasures to behold and wonders to be thankful for. 

50 years after Rachel Carson's Silent Spring

In honor of today's 50th anniversary of Rachel Carson's book Silent Spring, we're highlighting some of the discussion about the anniversary and the book's connection to modern issues. 

Who among us will make the next Rachel Carson possible? David Klinger, writer in the Service's Endangered Species Bulletin, poses this question with a "critical reexamination of both the woman and her groundbreaking bestseller, written by Carson amid the supercharged Cold War atmosphere of John Kennedy's 'New Frontier'": 

To some, she was a saint. The "fountainhead" of the modern environmental movement, deified almost a half-century after her death. To her memory are dedicated wildlife refuges and elementary schools, bridges in Pittsburgh and office edifices in Harrisburg ... and a training center dormitory in the Federal agency she had to quit in order to write what she truly wanted to write. Read the rest of Klinger's story.