The 1950s saw the advent of an array of synthetic pesticides that were hailed as modern miracles in the war against pests and weeds.

Carson was moved to write Silent Spring by her increasing concern about the effects of pesticides on wildlife. Rereading Silent Spring reminds one that the book's effectiveness was due mainly to Carson's passionate, poetic language describing the alleged horrors that modern synthetic chemicals visit upon defenseless nature and hapless humanity. Carson achieved financial independence in the 1950s with the publication of her popular celebrations of marine ecosystems, The Sea Around Us and The Edge of the Sea. Fish and Wildlife Service, eventually becoming the chief editor of that agency's publications. When I went in search of a copy recently, several bookstore owners told me they didn't have any in stock because local high schools still assign the book and students had cleaned them out.Ĭarson worked for years at the U.S. In 1999 Time named Carson one of the '100 People of the Century.' Seven years earlier, a panel of distinguished Americans had selected Silent Spring as the most influential book of the previous 50 years. The foreword to the 25th anniversary edition accurately declared, 'It led to environmental legislation at every level of government.' 'Without this book, the environmental movement might have been long delayed or never have developed at all,' declared then-Vice President Albert Gore in his introduction to the 1994 edition.

The modern environmentalist movement was launched at the beginning of June 1962, when excerpts from what would become Rachel Carson's anti-chemical landmark Silent Spring were published in The New Yorker.

Silent spring published