When active environmentalists were asked in a questionnaire, “Has there been an author who has most deeply affected your thinking about environmental issues?” respondents mentioned Rachel Carson about three times as often as any other writer. Carson’s book Silent Spring has been described as the primary catalyst in transforming the largely moribund conservation movement of the 1950s into the modern environmental movement of the 1960s and 1970s. Carson’s work precipitated the shift from first-generation environmental problems of land and resource protection to second-generation problems, especially pollution, which were more pervasive, less immediately apparent, and in many ways more insidiously threatening to members of the general population. The rise of pollution problems to the forefront of public policy concerns required a new vernacular, a new way of speaking about environmental threats and solutions. Rachel Carson, it is said, succeeded in one place where Leopold had failed; she injected ecological concepts and ideas into broader public policy discussions. Her graphic writing style, as well as her considerable status as a successful author, succeeded in transforming public discussions of environmental problems into a more ecological context by emphasizing the ways in which persistent chemicals move through natural systems and into human bodies. Immense economic stakes were involved in the pesticide issue; production of DDT, for example, quintupled between 1945 and 1962, as chemical manufacturers’ sales climbed from just over $10 billion to almost $33 billion. The publication of Silent Spring caused a huge public controversy; that controversy has set the parameters, as well as the tone, for much of the subsequent debate regarding environmental regulation and environmental policy. Carson began her attack on the indiscriminate use of pesticides with “A Fable for Tomorrow,” in which she described an imaginary town in the heart of America. She first described an idyllic scene of humans living in harmony with their surroundings, including woods and hedgerows inhabited by countless birds, and streams swimming with fish. But “then a strange blight crept over the area and everything began to change.” Domestic animals died. Humans became ill.
