Most importantly Silent Spring launched the modern global environmental movement. Carson showed how experts trusted their own creations too greatly and how they themselves were implicated in a vast complex of private and public interests designed to produce profits for chemical manufacturers and the growing agribusiness sector. The public had trusted such experts to exert greater control over nature, down even to the atom whose power was made to seem so miraculous, and make a happier, healthier, wealthier society. It called into question a major item of faith in the twentieth century, the authority of scientific experts.

In a broader sense and the longer term, Silent Spring helped create a change of attitude. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. Farm chemicals, pest-control chemicals, and household chemicals undergo much greater scrutiny, regulation, and control than before Rachel Carson published the book, and the chemicals allowed are less deadly and used in smaller amounts. Every one of the toxic chemicals named in the book was either banned or severely restricted in the United States by 1975. More immediately, Silent Spring affected government policy. Even the conservative National Review listed Silent Spring on its “100 Best Nonfiction Books of the Twentieth Century.” Britain’s Guardian newspaper in 2010 listed it among the “Fifty Books to Change the World.” In 2011, Time magazine put it on the All-TIME 100 Nonfiction Books list. Discover Magazine put Silent Spring on its “25 Greatest Science Books of All Time” in 2006. Random House’s Modern Library released a much-talked-about list of the 100 Best Nonfiction books of the twentieth century, on which Carson’s book was ranked #5. By the end of the twentieth century, it took its place on lists of the best books of the century or even of all time. Vice President Al Gore, “Introduction,” Silent Spring (1994 ed.), xiiiīy any measure, Silent Spring succeeded beyond anyone’s imagining. Carson has had as much or more effect on me than any of them, and perhaps than all of them together. Her picture hangs on my office wall among those of political leaders…. Her example inspired me to write Earth in the Balance…. Rachel Carson was one of the reasons why I became so conscious of the environment and so involved with environmental issues.

It was one of the books we read at home at my mother’s insistence and then discussed around the dinner table…. For me, personally, Silent Spring had a profound impact.

Rachel silent spring