Foreword

IN 1958, when Rachel Carson undertook to write the book that became Silent Spring,
she was fifty years old. She had spent most of her professional life as a marine biologist and
writer with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. But now she was a world-famous author, thanks
to the fabulous success of The Sea Around Us, published seven years before. Royalties from this
book and its successor, The Edge of the Sea, had enabled her to devote full time to her own
writing. To most authors this would seem like an ideal situation: an established reputation,
freedom to choose one’s own subject, publishers more than ready to contract for anything one
wrote. It might have been assumed that her next book would be in a field that offered the same
opportunities, the same joy in research, as did its predecessors. Indeed she had such projects in
mind. But it was not to be. While working for the government, she and her scientific colleagues
had become alarmed by the widespread use of DDT and other long-lasting poisons in so-called
agricultural control programs. Immediately after the war, when these dangers had already been
recognized, she had tried in vain to interest some magazine in an article on the subject. A
decade later, when the spraying of pesticides and herbicides (some of them many times as toxic
as DDT) was causing wholesale destruction of wildlife and its habitat, and clearly endangering
human life, she decided she had to speak out. Again she tried to interest the magazines in an
article. Though by now she was a well-known writer, the magazine publishers, fearing to lose
advertising, turned her down. For example, a manufacturer of canned baby food claimed that
such an article would cause “unwarranted fear” to mothers who used his product. (The one
exception was The New Yorker, which would later serialize parts of Silent Spring in advance of
book publication.) So the only answer was to write a book—book publishers being free of
advertising pressure. Miss Carson tried to find someone else to write it, but at last she decided
that if it were to be done, she would have to do it herself. Many of her strongest admirers
questioned whether she could write a salable book on such a dreary subject. She shared their
doubts, but she went ahead because she had to. “There would be no peace for me,” she wrote
to a friend, “if I kept silent.”

Silent Spring was over four years in the making. It required a very different kind of

research from her previous books. She could no longer recount the delights of the laboratories

at Woods Hole or of the marine rock pools at low tide. Joy in the subject itself had to be

replaced by a sense of almost religious dedication. And extraordinary courage: during the final

years she was plagued with what she termed “a whole catalogue of illnesses.”

Also she knew very well that she would be attacked by the chemical industry. It was not simply

that she was opposing indiscriminate use of poisons but—more fundamentally—that she had

made clear the basic irresponsibility of an industrialized, technological society toward the

natural world. When the attack did come, it was probably as bitter and unscrupulous as

anything of the sort since the publication of Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species a century before.

Hundreds of thousands of dollars were spent by the chemical industry in an attempt to

discredit the book and to malign the author—she was described as an ignorant and hysterical

woman who wanted to turn the earth over to the insects. These attacks fortunately backfired

by creating more publicity than the publisher possibly could have afforded. A major chemical

company tried to stop publication on the grounds that Miss Carson had made a misstatement

about one of their products. She hadn't, and publication proceeded on schedule. She herself was singularly unmoved by all this furor.

Meanwhile, as a direct result of the message in Silent Spring, President Kennedy set up a

special panel of his Science Advisory Committee to study the problem of pesticides. The panel’s

report, when it appeared some months later, was a complete vindication of her thesis. Rachel

Carson was very modest about her accomplishment. As she wrote to a close friend when the

manuscript was nearing completion: “The beauty of the living world I was trying to save has

always been uppermost in my mind—that, and anger at the senseless, brutish things that were

being done.... Now l can believe I have at least helped a little.” In fact, her book helped to make

ecology, which was an unfamiliar word in those days, one of the great popular causes of our

time. It led to environmental legislation at every level of government.

Twenty-five years after its original publication, Silent Spring has more than a historical

interest. Such a book bridges the gulf between what C. P. Snow called “the two cultures.”

Rachel Carson was a realistic, well-trained scientist who possessed the insight and sensitivity of

a poet. She had an emotional response to nature for which she did not apologize. The more she

learned, the greater grew what she termed “the sense of wonder.” So she succeeded in making

a book about death a celebration of life. Rereading her book today, one is aware that its

implications are far broader than the immediate crisis with which it dealt. By awaking us to a

specific danger—the poisoning of the earth with chemicals—she has helped us to recognize

many other ways (some little known in her time) in which mankind is degrading the quality of

life on our planet.

And Silent Spring will continue to remind us that in our over-organized and over-

mechanized age, individual initiative and courage still count: change can be brought about, not

through incitement to war or violent revolution, but rather by altering the direction of our

thinking about the world we live in.