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Door County Premiere of Noted
Film/Video Sponsored by DCEC |
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Environmental Council Premieres Rachel Carson Film |
 Ms. Lee as Rachel Carson in A Sense of Wonder |
Bill Moyers said "You cannot walk away unmoved" from A Sense of Wonder, a film about the life of author/activist Rachel Carson. The Door County Environmental Council (DCEC) will be hosting the Door County premiere screening of the film on Wednesday, May 13 at 7:00 pm at Crossroads at Big Creek, Sturgeon Bay. There is no admission charge.
Rachel Carson has been called the "patron saint" of the modern environmental movement. Praising Carson for her work, Al Gore wrote that, "without [Silent Spring] the environmental movement might have been long delayed or never developed at all." As an activist, Carson fought government negligence and unbridled corporate interest.
In 1962 she published her seminal work, Silent Spring, which alerted the world to the dangers of chemical pesticides and launched the modern environmental movement. The chemical industry fought "that hysterical woman" to suppress the book's publication with lawsuits and personal attacks. Carson, terminally ill with breast cancer, refused to be cowed. The book was on the bestsellers list for 86 weeks and has been translated into 30 languages. The film focuses on the last year of Carson's life, 1963-4.
Carson's legacy lives on. She was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest honor awarded by the government to a US citizen. Her work with Congress led directly to the passage of such important laws as the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, the National Environmental Policy Act and the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide and Rodenticide Act. These laws remain pillars of US environmental law.
A Sense of Wonder is a documentary-style film of a play written and starring Kaiulani Lee, an Obieˇ Award-winning actress from New York. Lee has been performing the play over the last 16 years at hundreds of colleges, universities. the Smithsonian Institute, the Albert Schweitzer Conference at the United Nations, the Sierra Club's centennial, and in Canada and in England and in Italy. Lee's play also opened the 2005 World Expo in Japan and in May of 2007 she performed it on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC.
The film runs 55 minutes and was shot in high definition video by Oscarˇ Award-winning cinematographer Haskell Wexler (One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?) Direction is by Christopher Monger (The Englishman Who Went Up A Hill But Came Down A Mountain, starring Hugh Grant, Waiting for the Light, starring Shirley McClaine and Girl From Rio, best film Hollywood Film Festivalˇ.) The musical score relies heavily on the works of Beethoven.
This screening of the film marks the first of four events to be sponsored by DCEC this summer. The next will be a seminar on Purchased Development Rights as a tool for preserving wild spaces, on June 17th, 7 pm, also at Crossroads. The featured speaker will be Vicki Elkin, policy director of the Gathering Waters Conservancy, Madison, Wisconsin.
For further information on the film and the DCEC summer series visit www.dcec-wi.org or call Jerry Viste, executive director, at (920) 743-6003.
The Door County Environmental Council is a 39-year-old not-for-profit organization dedicated to preserving Door County’s environment for the generations to come.
Door County Environmental Council
P O Box 114,
Fish Creek WI 54212
Phone: 920-743-6003 | FAX: 920-743-6727
Info@dcec-wi.org
