With her 1962 book, Silent Spring, Rachel Carson got DDT and other synthetic pesticides banned and saved bird life. Today it is humans who are directly threatened by technologies designed to extract the maximum profit at the lowest private cost and the maximum social cost from natural resources.
Once abundant clean water has become a scarce resource. Yet, in the US ground water and surface water are being polluted and made unusable by mountain top removal mining, fracking and other such "new technologies." Ranchers in eastern Montana, for example, are being forced out of ranching by polluted water.
Offshore oil drilling and chemical farming run-off have destroyed fisheries in the Gulf of Mexico. In other parts of the world, explosives used to maximize short-run fish catches have destroyed coral reefs that sustained fish life (
http://aquatek-california.com/coral-reef-destruction/). Deforestation for short-run agricultural production results in replacing bio-diverse rain forests with barren land. The "now generation" is leaving a resource-scarce planet to future generations.
Nuclear power plants are thoughtlessly built in earthquake and tsunami zones. Spent fuel rods are stored within the plants, a practice that adds their destructive potential to a catastrophic accident or act of nature.
http://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2012/06/19/silent-spring-for-us/
