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“A Fable for Tomorrow” began Silent Spring, the book by Rachel Carson which marks the start of the ecology movement. In 1936 when she was an agnostic biologist with the U.S. Bureau of Fisheries, Rachel Carson wrote her first book, Under the Sea Wind. While Editor-in-Chief at the Bureau, she wrote a best-seller, The Sea Around Us. Resigning her government position in order to realize her ideal vocation as a writer, she created her third book, The Edge of the Sea, illustrating the watery kingdoms alive on the Atlantic Coastline.
When Rachel was alerted by friends of the destruction caused by aerial spraying of their two-acre private bird sanctuary in Duxbury, Massachussets, she did enormous research and published Silent Spring. Attacks upon both the book and the author were fierce, but her supporters included President John F. Kennedy.
Silent Spring describe’s humanity’s war against nature since World War II when more than 200 chemicals were created and marketed to kill “pests” to farms, gardens, forests, and homes. These poisons displayed power to all plants, to still the songs of birds, and to cause the Mississippi Fish Kill which filled the river with five million dead floating fish.
Permanent pesticides such as DDT are profoundly harmful not only to life in the sea because the poisons pass right on up through the chains of life from plants to animals. Sweden became the first nation to take decisive action banning DDT.
Rachel Carson said that her biological work convinced her that the One sometimes declared dead “is very much alive and speaking to us through all things.”
Click here to view supplemental reading to Rachel Carson on Amazon
