HONORING A CHAMPION OF THE ENVIRONMENT
RACHEL CARSON
(1907-1963)

Rachel Carson’s most famous book, Silent Spring, was published in 1962. It begins with a deliberately chilling description of a town in which all of nature is completely silenced by pollution. Everything has stopped. Nothing is living. The songs of birds no longer fill the air. This was her metaphor for a reality that she believed could come true in many respects. It was a warning. Carson then goes on to examine in detail the effects that industrial-age chemicals were having on human and animal health. The book particularly focused on the devastating effects that DDT, a pesticide used to kill mosquitoes and other insects, appeared to be having on the reproduction of birds.

Carson was convinced that she must speak out to inform a society made complacent by postwar prosperity. When Silent Spring appeared, it did more than any single publication or event of that time to alert the world to the hazards of environmental poisoning. Carson’s personal courage propelled her to complete her work against formidable odds, confronting a government and industry that were heedlessly putting the future of the living world at risk. Her book is credited with inspiring the formation of the Environmental Protection Agency in 1970, and the banning of most uses of DDT in the United States in 1972. Since her death from cancer in 1963, she has come to be celebrated as a hero by the environmental community. She challenged the culture of her time and, in the process, shaped a powerful social movement that altered the course of American history.

Silent Spring was reissued in a 40th Anniversary Edition in 2002. Rachel Carson would have been 100 years old in May of 2007.