The founding text of the modern environmental movement
CARSON, Rachel. Silent Spring. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company. 1962.
8vo. Original green cloth, dust-jacket; pp. x, [6], 368. jacket design and text drawings by Lois and Louis Darling; slight scuffing to extremities of dustwrapper, otherwise very good, internally very bright.
First edition of this highly influential and controversial book, widely credited with launching the environmentalism movement in the West.
The book depicted an eerie future America in which all life, from fish to birds to human children, had been silenced by the pollution of the food chain by DDT, which had previously been considered close to miraculous in its protection of crops. Her four years of painstaking scientific research, in the face of much apathy from the establishment, made her apocalyptic conclusions unarguable. The book caused an outrage in the agro-chemical industry that mirrored the shock felt by society at large, and was hugely effective; it received the credit when the use of DDT was banned in the United States in 1972. It is, rightly, the book by which Rachel Carson is now most widely remembered.
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