ABSTRACT
It was January 1958, when Rachel Carson, a marine biologist who had been working with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, received a letter from Olga Owens Huckins of Duxbury, Massachusetts. The letter told of birds dying after local applications of the pesticide DDT (dichlorodiphenyl trichloroethane) (Gore, 1994). DDT had already been known to have detrimental effects on birds (Robbins et al., 1951), and the evidence would continue to grow (Robinson, 1969; Faber and Hickey, 1973; Fry and Toone, 1981). More sensitive to the pesticides in their environment, the birds showed effects long before effects were seen in other wildlife species or in humans.
