Authors and their influence on social movements

Happy Monday, everyone! Hope you all had a wonderful weekend! I personally could not have asked for a better weekend football wise....JMU, VT, and the Redskins all came out on top of their respective games, while UVA suffered a painful loss to U.Conn. Ah, gotta love football season!!!

Anyway, on the subject of social movements, (since that is technically what I'm supposed to be blogging about, LOL), I was browsing through some environmental articles and I found this interesting piece from U.S. News & World Report. The writer interviewed Bill McKibben, who is an environmental author/activist, and he points out that environmental literature is at the center of the environmentalist movement. Essentially, he believes that the movement stemmed from the writings of authors such as Rachel Carson, who caused the public to become aware of/concerned about issues that they had never taken the time or initiative to contemplate previously.

Regardless of your stance on environmental issues, I just wanted to share the idea presented in this article, because it applies to all types of movements. Even though we may tend to think of social movements in the context of groups of people who stage protests and circulate petitions to get what they want, it is important to also pay attention to the writers who share their own opinions and ideas with the public through words on paper. While these authors may not be activists themselves, they can potentially start a movement simply by bringing an issue to the forefront and sparking a need for change in the minds of their readers who will then take the initiative to make those changes occur.