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Silent Spring was written by Rachel Carson and published in spring 1962. The book surveyed the detrimental effects pesticides were having on the environment, and especially on birds. Carson criticized the chemical industry's campaigns of disinformation and the public officials who uncritically accepted industry claims of safety. The alternative biotic approach to pest control was a new concept for most of the book's original readers.
"Rachel Carson's Silent Spring played a large role in articulating ecology as a "subversive subject"— as a perspective that cut against the grain of materialism, scientism, and the technologically engineered control of nature," states Prof. Gary Kroll (see link).
The book, by a well-known writer on natural history who had not previously been a social critic, was widely read (weeks on the New York Times best-seller list) and in drawing public attention to this problem, began the widespread public concerns with the more general pollution of the environment. Silent Spring spurred the impetus for the banning of the pesticide DDT in the United States. As described in detail in the article on its author, the book was controversial at the time of its publication. It attracted hostile attention from commentators associated with the chemical industry, which spent more than a quarter of a million doillars to discredit the book and its recently-deceased author.
Houghton Mifflin was the only publisher that wanted to handle its publication.
An important legacy of Silent Spring has been the widespread public skepticism concerning the scientific control of both the individual human body and the environment.
The criticism of the book most commonly cited today is that its suggestion that the increase in the proportion of deaths in childhood caused by cancer (as a consequence of an increase in the background level of carcinogens) was culpably misleading in ignoring the contribution to the absolute reduction of the childhood death rate of immunization and antibiotics.
In addition, the banning of DDT throughout the world has led to a resurgence in malaria that has been responsible for the deaths of several hundred thousand people. As a result, some have argued that the environmental movement has blood on its hands for these resulting deaths.
Rachel Carson appears to have successfully predicted multiple chemical sensitivity disorder.
A symposium on the book and the topics it raises was held in Philadelphia in August 1984, Silent Spring Revisited, a compilation of papers from the symposium was published in 1987.
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