Silent Spring, Rachel Carson
“We are accustomed to look for the gross and immediate effect and to ignore all else. Unless this appears promptly and in such obvious form that it cannot be ignored, we deny the existence of hazard. ”
In a case of saving it for a special occasion, we almost forgot to post Rachel Carson’s seminal Silent Spring at all. At the time of its publication in 1962, Silent Spring was met with fierce opposition by chemical companies but brought about numerous changes to the United States’ national pesticide policy, famously leading to a nationwide ban on DDT for agricultural uses and inspiring an environmental movement that led to the creation of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
Today, we face the frightening prospect of a US trade deal which would weaken UK pesticide standards, threatening significant risk to the health of UK citizens and the environment. You can read more about the trade deal in George Monbiot’s article here and if this is an issue you feel strongly about, you can find out more and contact your MP here.
Rachel Carson was an American marine biologist, author, and conservationist. She graduated from Pennsylvania College for Women (now Chatham University) in 1929 and went on to study at the Woods Hole Marine Biological Laboratory, receiving her MA in zoology from Johns Hopkins University in 1932. She found success in her ability to bring her vast knowledge of the sea and sea-life to the general public with her poetic and absorbing prose (feats which were criticised by journalists and peers who branded her a “hysterical woman” who used “emotion fanning words”). Carson was Editor in Chief of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and her writing was recognised with various awards including The U.S. Book Award for The Sea Around Us, the George Westinghouse Science Writing Award 1950, the John Burroughs Medal of the John Burroughs Association and the title Woman of the Year in Literature.
