“Silent Spring” …. Rachel Carson!

~~April 16, 2014~~


Silent Spring is an environmental science book written by Rachel Carson and published by Houghton Mifflin on September 27, 1962. The book documented the detrimental effects of indiscriminate use of pesticides on the environment, particularly on birds. Carson accused the chemical industry of spreading disinformation, and public officials of accepting industry claims unquestioningly.


Although Silent Spring was met with fierce opposition by chemical companies, it spurred a reversal in national pesticide policy, which led to a nationwide ban on DDT for agricultural uses, and it inspired a grassroots environmental movement that led to the creation of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

~Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring” – Published Fifty Years Ago~

By: Mark Stoll, Environment and Society Portal

~A noisy half century~




New York Times headline "'Silent Spring' Is Now Noisy Summer," with portrait of Rachel Carson



Half a century later, Silent Spring continues to outrage many conservatives and inspire environmentalists.











Elixirs of Death,” “Needless Havoc,” “And No Birds Sing,” “Rivers of Death,” “Beyond the Dreams of the Borgias”:Silent Spring’s chapter titles seem to promise a lurid muckraker. The text, however, is impassioned but scrupulously scientific. Critics called the book inaccurate and exaggerated but they could never name specific examples of errors. The most telling criticism was that it one-sidedly omitted any positive benefits of chemicals. Rachel Carson’s defenders responded that the chemical industry’s promotion efforts had already done that quite well.

Other writers had written on overuse and misuse of chemical pesticides and herbicides and hardly anyone noticed. Why was Silent Spring so different? The most important reason was Carson herself, the most popular nature writer of the 1950s, with three recent best sellers. As the latest book by Carson, Silent Spring had a ready public who looked forward to it with keen interest.


Second was the quality of the writing itself. Surely no one but Carson had the literary skills to write an international best seller about chlorinated hydrocarbons. Decades of writing science for the public prepared her to present complex science to the general public in ways that both made it readily understandable and drew the reader in.

Finally, recent events and health scares had prepared the American public to hear and respond to the frightening message of Silent Spring. Most dramatic was the worrisome spread of radioactive substances across the globe from a spree of open-air tests of nuclear weapons. Carson explicitly compared pesticides to radiation: both were invisible, unavoidable, and threatening. Her explicit comparisons to now well-known health dangers from radiation made her task much easier to explain the very similar threats from dangerous agricultural chemicals.

Rachel Carson testifying before the Senate Government Operations subcommittee studying pesticide spraying (June 4, 1963)

Silent Spring prompted Congressional hearings.

On 4 April 1963, the day after a CBS documentary on the book aired, Connecticut senator Abraham Ribicoff announced hearings on pollution, including federal regulation of pesticides. Hearings started on 16 May, serendipitously one day after PSAC released its report. On 4 June, Carson testified. Echoing Abraham Lincoln’s famous greeting of Harriet Beecher Stowe, Ribicoff welcomed her with the words, “You are the lady who started all this.”


After Silent Spring, Congress revised the regulation of chemicals. Prior to 1962, the government regulated pesticides mainly to ensure that chemical preparations were effective and not fraudulent. The Insecticide Act of 1910 and the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act of 1947 (FIFRA) served these goals. A 1952 amendment to the Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act established a procedure for setting tolerances for chemical residues in food, feed, and fiber, but not for regulation of chemical use itself. Now Congress amended FIFRA to include attention to safety considerations in pesticide labeling.

Repeated environmental crises during the 1960’s, including major events like the Santa Barbara, California, oil well blowout and the Cuyahoga River fire in Cleveland, Ohio, kept environmental issues in the headlines.

The astonishing success of the first Earth Day in April of 1970 put tremendous pressure on politicians to act. The Nixon Administration established the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in 1970 and gave it authority to set tolerances for chemical residues. Congress amended FIFRA in 1972 to transfer pesticide regulation to the EPA and mandated protection of public and environment health. The EPA ceased licensing DDT in 1972.

The Toxic Substances Control Act of 1976 was Silent Spring’s greatest legal vindication. It directed the EPA to protect the public from “unreasonable risk of injury to health or the environment.” Under its authority, the EPA acted to ban or severely restrict all six compounds indicted in Silent Spring — DDT, chlordane, heptachlor, dieldrin, aldrin, and endrin—and assumed responsibility for testing new chemicals.







We ALL are connected through NATURE!! 

~~Rachel Carson, author of The Silent Spring~~

~~Uploaded on Apr 5, 2011~~

The Silent Spring by Rachel Carson was an explosive book when first published in 1962. It challenged the belief commonly held by scientists at the time, that man can control the balance of nature.


In my humble opinion, she foresaw the future that awaited us as a species. She foretold of the effects of introducing chemicals into Nature. She describe 50 years ago what is exactly happening in our times … both the effects on Nature and the adverse, as well as the extremely biased response from the big chemical companies.

I wonder what Monsanto, Dupont, Sygenta, Dow, Bayer, BASF would do if Rachel would be alive today. 



We ALL are ONE!! 

3 thoughts on ““Silent Spring” …. Rachel Carson!

  1. Pingback: Google Doodle …. Rachel Louise Carlson!! | It Is What It Is

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