ABSTRACT
In 1962, Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring energized Americans as has no other work in recent decades. Enormously controversial at the time, the book took on the chemical industries, pitting them against environmentalists and ordinary citizens. More fundamentally, Carson’s book reversed the mainstream progressive narrative. Biocides bludgeoned the landscape and assaulted the environment with lethal weapons in “man’s war against nature,” increasing alarm in a citizenry already mobilized over the hazards of nuclear weapons and radioactive fallout. “How could intelligent beings,” she asked, “seek to control a few unwanted species by a method that contaminated the entire environment and brought the threat of dis ease and death even to their own kind?” Carson’s book created a declensionist narrative that framed the insights of the environmental movement. Could the earth recover?1
