Rachel Carson-Silent Springs

During the seventeen years she worked in the US Fish and Wildlife Service, Rachel Carson learned about the problems of pesticides. Undaunted by the chemical companies' hostility and by the public's high enthusiasm for pesticides, she wrote a book called Silent Spring, which caused a major shift in public consciousness about the environment.

Rachel Carson's Successful Campaign to Bring the Pesticide Problem to Public Attention:

I. Rachel Carson's Background

II. Uses of DDT

III. Taking Action

V. Anticipating Hostile Reaction from the Chemical Industry

VI. Coping with Health Problems and Family Crises

VII. The Appearance of Silent Spring

Supporting Material:

Chronology of Events Leading to Silent Spring

Summary of Silent Spring

Silent Spring Revisited: A Discussion of Silent Spring

Excerpt from Letter to Reader's Digest from Carson

Excerpt from Letter to Carson from Huckins

Excerpt from Letter That Prevented Reader's Digest from Publishing Pesticide Article

Pesticides

List of Environmental Legislation and Agencies

Bibliography

Rachel Carson's Silent Spring: A Brief History of Ecology as a Subversive Subject

This essay by Gary Kroll discusses the role of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring in briefly articulating ecology as a "subversive subject" by taking aim at the overly mechanical and reductive sciences and by critiquing the cultural authority of science and technology to control nature.

Rachel Carson's Environmental Ethics

This essay by Philip Cafaro discusses Carson's environmental philosophy and asks the question, what are the "foundations" of Rachel Carson's environmental ethics? Cafaro examines how Carson justified her three main evaluative premises (or her two controversial ones, concern for human health presumably needing no justification). The essay also discusses several respects in which Rachel Carson's life and work might point the way forward for environmental ethics. First, Carson's frequent criticisms of human attempts to dominate nature suggest important parallels with contemporary ecofeminism. Second, Carson's philosophy of "reverence for life" seems to support the whole spectrum of environmental activism.