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This chapter focuses on nature writer and zoologist Rachel Carson. It offers a short biographical sketch and shows how she formulated and articulated her holistic ethos. Influenced by Presbyterianism, the nature movement, and scientific studies, Carson adopted a holistic understanding of life and popularized it in best‐selling books on the sea and pesticides. She wrote of a world of interconnecting parts that formed a whole. “In the ecological web of life,” she explained, “nothing exists alone.” Life was more than a mere collection of individuated atoms; earth's inhabitants survived in a community of interdependent relationships. The naturalist provided her readers with a compelling vision that emphasized harmony, balance, community, and mutuality, and she struck a chord in American society that resonated with particular appeal. Her books became a catalyst for the modern environmental movement and shaped the way many understood the relationships between humans and nature. This study supports the work of environmental historians who have situated Carson within a holistic paradigm in ecology, and it extends our understanding of Carson by positioning her in the culture more broadly. Alongside architects, psychologists, and social reformers, she invoked holistic frameworks to comprehend the world, question the status quo, express individual needs, and enact change.

This chapter discusses the excesses of the Industrial Revolution and the explosion of the human population as the issues that showed us the devastating impact that human activities could have on the earth. It traces the environmental movement through the 20th century, noting that it gained an ethic and a mission with two important mid-century publications: Aldo Leopold's Sand County Almanac in 1949 and Rachel Carson's Silent Spring. It reviews the life and accomplishments of Lee Talbot, a key player in the development of US environmental policy and practice.

This chapter provides an analysis of Thomas Merton's letter to Rachel Carson and a brief clarification of how these two literary minds were prophets of both revelation and revolution. Rachel Carson was the author of the recently published Silent Spring. Merton's January 12, 1963, letter is a watershed moment, or “spot of time”, in his developing environmental consciousness. Merton's reading of Silent Spring was an epiphanic event akin to other well-known and powerful moments of spiritual insight in his life. Nearly fifty years later, it can verify that Silent Spring became the catalyst for the current environmental movement. In both writers, there is a sense of responsibility for environmental health that comes from attentiveness to their surroundings and commitment to a coherent vision of the cosmos. There is also what the ecocritic Jonathan Bate has called ecopoesis—a deep longing for belonging.

This introductory chapter begins by contextualising the study, discussing the representation of Nature in early Cold War American culture and the emergence of modern environmentalism from 1945. The chapter also outlines the book’s argument that whilst the publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962) is understandably viewed as a watershed moment in terms of raising environmental consciousness in America, Silent Spring should also be considered as part of a developing trend of ecological portrayals of Nature in American literature written after 1945. This opening chapter also situates the book’s argument within the field of Cold War literary studies and introduces the book’s ecocritical methodology, including its sustained engagement with Timothy Morton’s ideas of ‘the mesh’ and ‘the ecological thought’ as outlined in The Ecological Thought (2010).

This essay reviews the book Silent Spring (1962), by Rachel Carson. Silent Spring alerted readers to the environmental and human dangers of indiscriminate use of pesticides and other toxic pollutants, spurring revolutionary changes in U.S. laws affecting our air, land, and water. What Carson called the “chain of evil”—the buildup of chemicals in our environment—continues unbroken to this day. And even though the political firestorm Silent Spring stirred up forty-three years ago burns with just as much intensity today, most of Carson's science remains sound and her warnings prescient. If we take a mental snapshot of what we know now about the dangers of chemical exposure, the questions still outnumber the answers. Yet one thing remains as certain as it was in 1962: we are leaving a toxic trail that will outlive us. Carson described in great scientific detail the dangers of DDT and its sister chlorinated chemicals, and her writings transformed how people felt about pesticides.

In his essay, “Speculative Ecology: Rachel Carson’s Environmentalist Documentaries,” Daniel Worden argues that Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring is not only a path-breaking work of investigative journalism, but also a daring work of imaginative projection. Rereading this seminal book in light of Carson’s earlier writing about the ocean, which she portrays as vast and indecipherable, Worden reinterprets Carson’s storied career and demonstrates her contribution to contemporary writing about climate change. Tasked with describing catastrophe that unfolds incrementally, Carson’s speculative documentary defamiliarizes nature itself, performing the work of estrangement that survival may require.

This chapter presents three sets of images as together constituting a prehistory of environmental icons: advertisements against nuclear testing produced by SANE (the National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy); the Daisy Girl and other TV commercials produced for the 1964 Lyndon Baines Johnson presidential campaign; and pesticide imagery that followed publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962) and culminated with the 1972 federal ban on DDT. These images depicted the temporality of the environmental crisis by portraying the long-term risks of radioactive fallout and pesticides to the environment and the human body. This chapter explains how popular images challenged the Cold War emotional style by picturing innocent children as the prime victims of environmental danger. From SANE ads to the DDT ban, images helped popularize notions of the ecological body by explaining the ways that Strontium-90 and pesticides could enter the food chain and thereby threaten fragile ecosystems and human health.

The book’s concluding chapter begins with an ecocritical reading Gregory Corso’s 1958 poem ‘Bomb’. The conclusion then reflects on the book’s contributions to the fields of Cold War literary criticism and ecocriticism. As part of the book’s re-evaluation of the significance of the Cold War period to contemporary ecocritical debate, this chapter also develops the book’s argument that Rachel Carson’s seminal work Silent Spring (1962) should be viewed as one of a growing number of American texts written after 1945 that present an interdependent, ecological vision of the human’s relationship to its environment.

Rachel Carson was an American marine biologist who began her career at the U.S. Bureau of Fisheries, and became a full-time nature writer in the 1950s, most known for Silent Spring, published in 1962. Alarmed by the damage done to the environment by synthetic pesticides, Carson wrote passionately, and effectively, about the need for developing a culture and ethic of conservation. Meeting fierce opposition by chemical companies, Carson became more even more emboldened. Ultimately, Carson’s vision proved highly influential, spurring a reversal in national policy on pesticides, and inspiring a grassroots environmental movement that led to the creation of the United States Environmental Protection Agency. Few books in the history of the twentieth century can be said to have exercised such an impact as Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring. What was it about this woman’s vision and conviction that allowed it to bring about such revolutionary results? What was it about her times? This contribution seeks to provide answers to these and other questions.

This chapter examines the budding movement for pesticide reform during the period 1962–1972. It begins with a discussion of Rachel Carson’s 1962 book Silent Spring, which introduced the public to the adverse effects of pesticides by addressing the unexplainable sicknesses and death that plagued people and livestock living in a fictional town. It then considers how concerned scientists disseminated information about the ill effects of pesticides directly and indirectly to the United Farm Workers Organizing Committee and environmental organizations. It also discusses the growing concern of both environmentalists and farmworker groups about pesticides, particularly DDT, as well as their development of fairly different strategies in their attempts to make change. The chapter argues that the differences in strategies limited but did not preclude opportunities for collaboration between farmworkers and the environmental movement, especially in mounting legal challenges. Their efforts paid off when in June 1972, the Environmental Protection Agency issued an order to ban nearly all uses of DDT in the six months following.

The introductory chapter reinterprets Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962) and its historiographical legacy. It begins with an exploration of lay and expert conceptualizations of the relationship between health and the environment in the United States in the pre-WWII period. It then situates health and environmentalism within both the broader political culture of liberal and progressive activism in the post-WWII period, and the legislative and regulatory trajectory of health and the environment.  From these broader histories, the chapter argues that the widespread lionization of Carson’s work and person, by embracing an influential yet bounded reformism for which health was a matter of personal choice and individual boundaries, has impeded a more wide-ranging scholarly engagement with the centrality of health to environmental politics.

This chapter examines birding in the environmental age, with particular emphasis on the ways the gospel of environmental conservation changed the balance between conservation and recreation in the hobby and the ways ecological insights influenced field guides. It looks at three books that represent the early environmental years: Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, Chandler Robbins and Arthur Singer's Birds of North America, and Kenn Kaufman's Kingbird Highway. The chapter first traces birdwatching in the early environmental years, focusing on the tension between conservation and recreation as well as conservation's transformation from a genteel concern with birds as something good in our lives to a staunch advocacy of the ecosystems on which both birds and humans depend. It then considers Carson's ideas and in particular the battle over DDT, in which birders such as Lorrie Otto and Joseph Hickey figured prominently. It also analyzes recreational birding, along with the emergence of a new generation of field guides and the growing national competition for a record list.

This chapter discusses the use of different pesticides after the banning of DDT in 1972. Based on the message from Silent Spring, many Americans considered DDT as the most harmful insecticide due to its effects on wildlife, particularly birds. American legislators became concerned about environmental cancer. When DDT and other chlorinated hydrocarbons underwent scrutiny, farmers turned to alternatives such as toxaphene and organophosphates. By 1976, organophosphates dominated insecticides in agricultural use. The passage of the Food Quality Protection Act in 1996 and the review of organophosphates in 2006 ultimately led to the removal of organophosphates the market.

This chapter presents two examples to demonstrate that natural history is the necessary basis of any reliable understanding of the world. More than a half century ago, Rachel Carson revolutionized the public’s view of pesticides. The foundation of her success was the careful use of natural history data, collated from across North America. The examples she assembled left little doubt that DDT and other pesticides were causing a widespread decline in birds. More recently, the case for the impact of atrazine on wildlife was based on laboratory experiments, without the advantage of natural history observations. For atrazine, natural history observations now suggest that other chemical agents are more likely to be responsible for feminization of wildlife populations. Developing expectations for scientists to collect natural history information can help to avoid over-extrapolating lab results to wild populations, a tendency often seen when those lab results conform to preconceptions about chemicals in the environment.

In which we make the transition from the nineteenth to the twentieth centuries as issues of conservation and preservation become entwined with natural history. John Muir’s travels both within the United States and globally echo some of the early natural historians, but the emphasis has shifted from one of discovery to one of concern. The founding of the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology at Berkeley and the founding of the School of Forestry at Yale mark two axes of future direction to what comes to be called ecology.