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NYT on Rachel Carson's anniversary give props to rhet/comp scholars:
http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/09/27/how-rachel-carson-spurred-c...

"But of all the fresh considerations of Carson’s work, there’s one that stands out for me at the moment — a recent paper by two researchers of rhetoric and writing who dug in on “Silent Spring” drafts, notes and revisions and found that Carson had a remarkable and rare trait for someone so committed to raising public concern about a pressing environmental issue. Rather than downplay scientific uncertainty and gaps in understanding, she progressively amplified what was unclear about the human impacts of DDT and other synthetic compounds on humans and wildlife.

"The authors, Kenny Walker, a doctoral candidate at the University of Arizona, and Lynda Walsh, an assistant professor of English at the University of Nevada, Reno, describe how surprised they were by this pattern, given a large body of work, including “Merchants of Doubt,” the book by Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway, showing that inflating uncertainty has mainly been the task of industry-backed efforts to blunt public concern and policy.

"With Carson’s approach to conveying risk, they write, she appears to have created “a bridge across the is–ought divide in science-related policy making, using the uncertainty topos to invite the public to participate by supplying fears and values that would warrant proposals for limiting pesticide use.”..."

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