Silent Spring Study Guide

Rachel Carson was an important figure in modern American environmentalism, whose work is sometimes credited with creating the grassroots movement that led to the establishment of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). She grew up on a farm in Pennsylvania, and then earned a master’s in zoology from Johns Hopkins University in 1932, while working in research labs to earn money for tuition. When her father’s sudden death left her without the time or funds necessary to continue on to a doctorate, Carson found a job with the U.S. Bureau of Fisheries, later known as the Fish and Wildlife Service. While there, she began writing and published articles in newspapers and magazines. The first books that earned her fame were written on the topic of marine biology. With their success, she was able to quit her job and focus on writing full time, and her interests began to shift more toward conservation. She began work on Silent Spring, her most lasting legacy, in 1958, gathering research and soliciting contributions from major experts. The process of writing the book was slowed by family issues, and then by sickness when Carson was diagnosed with breast cancer. She died of a heart attack two years after its publication, in 1964.

Carson’s decision to report on the dangers of pesticides was a result of a fire ant eradication program in 1957 in which DDT mixed with fuel oil was sprayed on private and public land in Long Island. After its publication, Silent Spring inspired a grassroots political movement that led to the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency in 1970 and a ban on DDT in 1972.

Silent Spring is part of a tradition of nature writing that has its American roots in writers like Henry David Thoreau, author of Walden Pond and key figure in the transcendentalist movement, and John Muir, whose popular written accounts of the American West and public campaigning were instrumental in the founding of America’s National Park Service. Her conservationist ideas were prefigured by contemporaries like Aldo Leopold (A Sand County Almanac, 1948), whose work brought public attention to the values of environmentalism.