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Great Moon Hoax begins on this day in 1835. The New York Sun newspaper, one of the first of the “penny press,” claimed that Sir John Hirschel, a famed astronomer then known to be in South Africa, had discovered fabulous winged creatures on the moon. Herschel was said to have been amused by the hoax at first, but then became annoyed with having to constantly answer questions about it. Benjamin Day, the Sun’s editor and publisher, probably made the story up to compete with James Gordon Bennett’s wildly successful crime and scandal sheet, the New York Herald.

Jules Verne

The French science fiction author who helped envision the future was born this day in 1828. He is probably best known for his novels Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1870), Journey to the Center of the Earth (1864), and Around the World in Eighty Days (1873). A subtext running through many of Verne’s novels involved the danger of having powerful technology fall into the wrong hands. Other authors, notably H.G. Wells, Mary Shelly shared this moral perspective.

Journalist Nelly Bly starts off around the world in a stunt for Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World newspaper on this day in 1889. The idea is to beat Jules Verne’s fictional character who went “Around the World in 80 Days.” Bly takes only 72 days. More importantly, Bly’s trip is the beginning of a global vision in which every region is accessible and potentially understood by every person. Similar explorations that provided a global view — including space exploration in the 1960s – 2000s — would instill similar visions of a “whole” earth, or a “spaceship” earth with limited resources. Starting around the turn of the 21st century, instant free global communication had become a reality, and a global vision of humanity would finally beginning to dawn.

Ivan Illich is born on this day in 1926. The Austrian philosopher and former Catholic priest was author of a dozen books, including his first prominent work, 1971  Deschooling Society, in which  Illich argued that we need convivial tools as opposed to machines.  Three years later, Illich wrote Energy and Equity, arguing that we were looking at the “energy crisis” through the wrong end of the human experience.  Rather than creating more and more energy, Illich argued for energy conservation and a ceiling on energy use. This is, he said, “the only strategy by which a political process can be used to set limits on the power of even the most motorized bureaucrat. Participatory democracy postulates low-energy technology. Only participatory democracy creates the conditions for rational technology.”  He also noted: “Past a certain threshold of energy consumption, the transportation industry dictates the configuration of social space.”

Sarah Orne Jewett born on this day. Jewett was the author of A White Heron an allegory of economic and social pressures opposed to nature, in which a young woman cannot bring herself to disclose the location of a beautiful heron to an attractive young hunter who offers money for her help.

George Bird Grinnell born this day in Brooklyn, NY.
Grinnell was among the most prominent conservation advocates of the early Progressive Era in the US. He organized the first Audubon Society, was an author and advocate for conservation causes. He was also editor of Forest and Stream Magazine from 1876 to 1911, and an organizer of the New York Zoological Society.

Silent Spring is published this day in 1962 by Rachel Carson, an author and biologist. Sections of the book had been published that previous spring and summer by the New Yorker, and a full-throated uproar was already underway over her “attack” on American agriculture. It took decades for the book to be seen as an appropriate and cautionary tale, and today, most people understand Carson’s point on overuse of pesticides. Some say that Carson “started” the environmental movement, and of course, that would depend on how the word “environmental” is defined. A vigorous conservation and anti-pollution effort was already emerging in the US during the 20th century, and, as this Timeline demonstrates, concerns about public health are longstanding in human history. It’s true that Carson added a huge amount of momentum and struck the right note in her book. It’s also true that the audience was ready for her message. Time Magazine and the New York Times have fairly good articles on the 50th anniversary of Silent Spring in 2012. Also, a new book about Carsonby William Souder is now available. One thing to note: There is a stubborn fringe movement that insists that she killed more people than Attila the Hun because her work led to the banning of pesticides like DDT. Actually, Carson never advocated a total ban on DDT, saving it (when effective) for human health use and the fight against malaria mosquitoes. Nor was it ever really banned. DDT is also accepted for human health and the fight against malaria by the Stockholm convention, which is the international treaty banning agricultural use of persistent organic pollutants. But drenching fields with chemicals, when other approaches such as IPM are far more effective, is what Carson and the environmental movement objected to. Carson was, and remains, an environmental hero.

Cartoonist who cared J.N. “Ding” Darling is born in Norwood, Michigan on this day in 1876. A Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist for the New York Tribune, Darling published his first conservation-minded cartoon in 1901, supporting President Theodore Roosevelt’s call to establish a national Forest Service. Darling came up with the idea for raising money for wildlife programs through hunter purchases of a duck stamp.  He also illustrated the first duck stamp. In 1936, Darling established the National Wildlife Federation.

Francis Trollope an English writer and reformer whose heart-wrenching books evoked empathy for the poor and downtrodden, was born this day in 1779. In her “Life and Adventures of Michael Armstrong, the Factory Boy,” published in 1840, Trollope wrote: “Exactly at the bottom of the hill began a long, closely packed double row of miserable dwellings, crowded to excess by the population drawn together by the neighborhood factories. There was a squalid, untrimmed look about them all … an odour, which seemed compounded of a multitude of villainous smells, all reeking together into one, floated over them… My eye caught the little figures of a multitude of children, made distinctly visible, even by that dim light, by the strong relief in which their dark garments showed themselves against the snow. A few steps farther brought me in full view of the factory gates, and then I perceived conserably above two hundred of thise miserable little victims to avarice all huddled together on the ground, and seemingly half buried in the drift that was blown against them. I stood still and gazed upon them — I knew full well what, and how great, was the terror [of a beating by the mill foreman] which had brought them there too soon, and in my heart of hearts I cursed the boasted manufacturing wealth of England, which … gives power, lawless and irresistible, to overwhelm and crush the land it pretends to fructify.”

Johnathan Swift  Anglo-Irish writer and satirist, is born this day in 1667. As the author of Gulliver’s Travels and “A Modest Proposal”  Swift satirically mocked heartless attitudes towards the poor and ridiculed the grandiosity of the ruling elite.  His books are among the most famous classics of both English and world literature.