by Sharon Guynup
May 23, 2022

In her landmark 1962 book, Silent Spring, biologist Rachel Carson chronicled the damage — and looming consequences — of human “contamination of air, earth, rivers, and sea with dangerous and even lethal materials,” which she called “elixirs of death.” In the book’s spellbinding opening parable, which profiles a fictional town of the future, she wrote:

“It was a spring without voices. On the mornings that had once throbbed with the dawn chorus of robins, catbirds, doves, jays, wrens, and scores of other bird voices there was now no sound; only silence lay over the fields and woods and marsh.”

Silent Spring focused on DDT. During World War II, the U.S. military declared this revolutionary biocide to be “the most powerful of the new weapons the army is now using in its war on insect-borne diseases,” specifically malaria, yellow fever, typhus and bubonic plague.

Read full article here