Paul Elie is the author of The Life You Save May Be Your Own, Reinventing Bach and is a frequent contributor to The New Yorker. As part of our celebration of the 50th anniversary of Earth Day we invited Paul Elie to trace the literary history of the environmental movement from Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring to Pope Francis’s encyclical on the environment. Though the plight of the Earth has become a fixture of collective consciousness, he asks if we will live up to the promise of unified action on behalf of the Earth.

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