Silent Spring

This pivotal book was given to me by my grandmother when I was about 16 years old. In a tattered state, it is still part of my library. It is the seminal text for all of mankind to consider how the earth has suffered during the long epoch of the Industrial Revolution. 

I would tell my friends that Rachel begins with a fable, a spring without the sound of birds. Just as Oliver Rackham in Woodlands begins with a fable to tell the story of how trees came into being.  

For a powerful assessment of Carson’s role in the great… show more.

Two years ago I´ve read Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring for the first time. I was baffled. It´s a book on the biodiversity crisis in the 50s and 60s, but it seemed like reading a new release. That´s not only because of Carson’s lively and modern way to describe the vanishing of insects and birds because of DDT & Co. It´s also because the spreading of as powerful as disastrous pesticides still continues today as does the view that nature has to serve humans.

I read her book as a child, and it never left my memory. I was drawn to her “Fable of Tomorrow,” which she used to set the stage, and which became unforgettable in her readers’ minds. It launched the environmental movement. It is a literary device that inspired me in the writing of my essays, which at times take on the character of a fable.

Credited with the launch of the modern environmental movement, Silent Spring is that rare work that alters the course of human history. Yet it remains revelatory today, due to the author’s beautiful writing and storytelling. Rachel Carson grew up in an idyllic riverside town in Western Pennsylvania, an area sandwiched between coal-fired steel plants that polluted the landscape. She went on to study biology and ecology in college. She had already established herself as one of the nation’s top science writers when she became alarmed at the non-military uses for DDT as a pesticide that was being sprayed widely over… show more.

David Attenborough, the natural historian famous for the Planet Earth series, cited Silent Spring as likely the most influential book on the scientific community since Origin of Species by Charles Darwin. It didn’t start out that way. 

Upon its release, author Rachel Carson was accused of everything from being a communist to advocating for genocide. Her astute analysis survived the storm and opened a space for launching the Environmental Protection Agency. Most importantly, her research initiated a public dialogue around the long-term sustainability of the living world.