User:Tatumburnett/sandbox

Marjorie Spock was born the second child and the first daughter of six children. Her Father Benjamin Spock was the General Solicitor of the New York, New Haven, and Hartford Railroads, and her older brother was Benjamin Spock, the world-renowned pediatrician and author of The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care.

At 18, Spock decided to leave her formal education to study Eurythmy, and the study of dynamics and human movement. She moved to Switzerland to studied at the Goetheanum in Dornach, Switzerland. There she met and worked with Rudolf Steiner, the founder of anthroposophy. She was present at the "Christmas Conference" of December 25, 1923 – January 1, 1924 when the Anthroposophical Society was refounded.[1]

When she returned to the U.S., Spock received her BA and MA degrees from Columbia University at the age of 38. Upon receiving her degrees served as the head of Dalton Middle School and also taught in New York at the Rudolf Steiner School, Fieldston Lower School and Waldorf School.

Throughout her career, Spock also published multiple books, pamphlets and articles, including “Teaching as a Lively Art”, “Eurythmy”, and “Fairy Worlds and Workers: A Natural History of Fairyland”,

Spock LAO worked closely with Ehrenfried Pfeiffer for the biodynamic agriculture movement in the U.S.[1]

Spock died on January 23, 2008, Sullivan, Maine where she lived.[2]

In the late 1950s, Marjorie Spock,  along with her friend Mary Richards, a digestive invalid, who required a diet of organic and fresh produce, lived in Long Island, New York, practicing organic agriculture.

In the summer of 1957 the state and federal Government began a massive aerial spraying over wide areas of the countryside, including Spock and Richards's land with DDT mixed with fuel oil at least fourteen times a day in an attempt to eradicate the Gypsy Moth Disease.

With their crops, soil and livestock destroyed, Spock and Richards joined a pending application for an injunction to stop the US Government from aerial spraying. When the injunction was denied, the plantiffs brought a law suit in the US Federal Court in Brooklyn NY in February, with a  group elleven other Long Island plaintiffs, including Robert Cushman Murphy. The suit was brought against the United States Government  attempting to prevent the federal and state government form spraying their properties, and for damages

For Spock, the concern was for people’s health and the constitutional right for a property owner to manage her land free of government infringement.[3][4]

The Federal judge dismissed 72 uncontested admissions for the plaintiffs and denied their petition. After three years of exhausting all legal appeals. the case reached the U.S. Supreme Court in 1960, however it was declined on a technicality. The plaintiffs lost the case but won the right to enjoin the government, prior to a potentially destructive environmental activity, to provide a full scientific review of the proposed action.[3][4] With this right to environmental review, Spock helped give rise to the environmental movement.[1]

Throughout the three year process, Spock wrote daily reports on the trials, and sent them to interested and influential friends of the case's progress. Rachel Carson heard of Spock's case and soon got the daily reports. Carson used the testimony from the experts that Spock had found in her own research.[1] Spock's case, along with a massive bird kill on Cape Cod, provided the impetus for Carson's book, Silent Spring.[1]