On September 27 of 1962, Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring was published. It had already generated a great deal of discussion, after serialization in the New Yorker, and ultimately was credited with the banning of DDT and with helping to spawn the modern environmental movement.
Carson’s first book, The Sea Around Us, addressed her scientific specialty, marine biology, but it was Silent Spring that helped change the world. Carson’s lyrical prose was worthy of the New Yorker, and Silent Spring remains one of the most readable and important science books, alongside Darwin’s On the Origin of Species.
Silent Spring was radical for its time, causing intense chemical industry criticism, but in retrospect it was moderate in its recommendations, though that was an era when even tobacco was only beginning to be seen for the deadly danger that it was and remains. Carson was suffering from cancer as she finalized the book and died less than two years later. Her memory and legacy remains bright sixty years later.
My daughter and I recently published a book of ekphracstic poems, one of which echoes the memory of Rachel Carson. The book, like the picture above, was inspired by pictures sent to me by my daughter from Chile, which I responded to with poems. The following poem accompanies this photograph:
