ABSTRACT
Civil rights, the Vietnam war, and women's rights were the focal points of the social protests of the 1960s and 1970s. But the critical attitude of the time also raised other challenges to the "establishment," including the rights of consumers and protection of the environment. Among the studies published by the organizations founded by Nader, several concerned the deterioration of the environment due to industrial pollution. Like consumerism, environmentalism has a history reaching back to the nineteenth century, and it, too, was revitalized in the 1960s by a book: Rachael Carson's Silent Spring aroused the nation with its description of the devastation caused by agricultural insecticides. Among the most shocking cases of environmental pollution uncovered in the 1960s and 1970s were those involving toxic chemicals—some lethal—as exemplified in the industrial city of Woburn, on the Aberjona River, in Massachusetts.
