Rachel Carson’s book of 1962 helped kickstart the environmental movement in America
Once there was a town where Nature’s creatures lived in harmony. The seasons passed; the wilderness bloomed. All was as it should be. Then suddenly, everything changed.
“No witchcraft, no enemy action had silenced the rebirth of new life in this stricken world. The people had done it themselves,” wrote Rachel Carson in “Silent Spring”. This fable opens her landmark environmental book, first published in 1962.
A marine biologist at America’s Bureau of Fisheries (the predecessor of the Fish and Wildlife Service), Carson (pictured) was concerned about the indiscriminate use of ddt and other pesticides in post-war America.
At the time prolific quantities were being used in farming and sprayed on the habitats of the Anopheles mosquito that spreads malaria. Worried about the disastrous side-effects of the chemical that America’s Centres for Disease Control and Prevention called “the atomic bomb of the insect world”, Carson decided to sound the alarm.