Silent Spring

* Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, first published in 1962, bright light to how the widespread use of chemical pesticides was posing a serious threat to public health and leading to the destruction of wildlife. While numerous philosophers have written on this topic throughout history, Rachel Carson did an excellent job at creating a more basic way for the general public to comprehend the troubles in the environment at the time. This book was no doubt in response to the increasing awareness in the 1960s of the effects that technology, industry, economic expansion and population growth were having on the environment. Carson's thesis that we were subjecting ourselves to slow poisoning by the misuse of chemical pesticides that polluted the environment may seem like common problem in today’s world, but in 1962 Silent Spring contained the bud of social revolution. In Rachel Caron’s, Silent Spring, she highlights the effect of harmful pesticides such as DDT have on the American Bald Eagle; The bald eagle’s recovery is perhaps the best-known example of how our environmental laws worked to restore not just a resource but also our very national symbol since 1967.
  * In an interview with Linda Lear, she stated that Rachel Carson “wanted us to understand that we were just a blip […] the nature around us is the real world and we must treat it as such.” She always recognizes the fact that we are only given one earth to live on, and that’s final. Linda Lear is a political and environmental biographer intrigued by how the lives of artists and writers have been influenced by the natural world. She is the author of the prize-winning biographies Rachel Carson: Witness for Nature (1997,2009) and Beatrix Potter: A Life in Nature, 2007. She’s been a long-time academic historian, and she has been writing professionally since 1997.
  * A pesticide is any substance used to kill, repel, or control certain forms of plant or animal life that are considered to be pests. Pesticides include...