The modern environmentalist movement was launched at the beginning of June 1962, when excerpts from what would become Rachel Carson's anti-chemical landmark Silent Spring were published in The New Yorker. "Without this book, the environmental movement might have been long delayed or never have developed at all," declared then-Vice President Albert Gore in his introduction to the 1994 edition. The foreword to the 25th anniversary edition accurately declared, "It led to environmental legislation at every level of government."
In 1999 Time named Carson one of the "100 People of the Century." Seven years earlier, a panel of distinguished Americans had selected Silent Spring as the most influential book of the previous 50 years. When I went in search of a copy recently, several bookstore owners told me they didn't have any in stock because local high schools still assign the book and students had cleaned them out.
Carson worked for years at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service,......
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Approximate Word Count: 1974
Approximate Pages: 8 (260 words per double-spaced page) |