Silent Spring

Rachel Carson | 1962

Carson’s renowned Silent Spring strengthened conservation movements and helped launch environmental communication as a discipline. It is a terrifying and powerful book about the agricultural industry’s prolific application of pesticides and its health effects on the environment, wildlife, and people. Her description of an anonymous American community where life has been silenced due to the DDT chemical is chilling, to say the least, and one of my favorite uses of fiction to address a real problem. If you’d rather not read an entire book on the subject then you can read the original article in The New Yorker.

“A grim spectre has crept upon us almost unnoticed, and soon my imaginary town may have thousands of real counterparts.”

“Given time—time not in years but in millennia—life adjusts, and a balance has been reached. For time is the essential ingredient; but in the modern world there is no time.”