Foreword
IN 1958, when Rachel Cars on undertook to write the book that became Silent Spring,
s he was fifty years old. She had spent most of her professional life as a marine biologist and
write r with the U. S. Fis h and Wildlife Service. But now s he was a world-famous author, thanks
to the fabulous s uccess of The Sea Around Us, publis hed s even years before. Royalties from this
book and its s uccess or, The Edge of the Sea, had enabled her to devote full time to her own
writing. To mos t authors this would s eem like an ideal s ituation: an es tablis hed reputation,
freedom to choos e one’s own s ubject, publis hers more tha n ready to c ontract for anything one
wrote. It might have bee n as s umed that her nex t book would be in a field that offered the same
opportuni ties , the s ame joy in res earch, as did its predecess ors. Indeed s he had s uch projects in
mind. But it was not to be. While working for the government, she and her scientific colleagues
had become alarmed by the wides pread us e of DDT and other long-lasting poisons in so-called
agricultural control programs. Immediately after the war, when these dangers had already been
recognized, s he had tried in vain to interes t s ome magazine in an article on the s ubject. A
decade later, when the s praying of pes ticides and herbicides (s ome of them many ti mes as toxic
as DDT) was causing wholesale destruction of wildlife and its habitat, and clearly endangering
human life, s he decided s he had to s peak out. Again s he tried to interes t the magazines in an
article. Though by now she was a well-known writer, the magazine publis hers , fearing to los e
advertis ing, turne d he r down. For exa mple, a manufacture r of canned ba by food claimed that
s uch an article would caus e “unwarranted fear” to mothe rs who us ed his product. (The one
exception was The New Yorker, which would later serialize parts of Silent Spring in advance of
book publication.) So the only ans wer was to write a book—book publis hers being free of
advertis ing press ure. Mis s Cars on tried to find someone else to write it, but at last she decided
that if it were to be done, s he would have to do it he rs elf. Many of her s t ronges t admire rs
ques tioned whether s he could write a s alable book on s uch a dreary s ubject. She s hared their
doubts , but she went ahead becaus e s he had to. “There would be no peace for me,” s he wrote
to a friend, “if I kept silent.”
Silent Spring was over four years in the making. It require d a very different kind of
res earch from her p revious boo ks. She could no longer recount the delights of the laboratories
at Woods Hole or of the marine rock pools at low tide. Joy in the s ubject its elf had to be
replaced by a sense of almost religious dedication. And extraordinary courage: during the final
years s he was plagued with what she termed “a whole catalogue of illnesses.”
Als o s he knew very well tha t s he would be attacked by the che mical indus try. It was not s imply
that s he was oppos ing indiscriminate us e of pois ons but—more fundame ntally—that s he had
made clear the basic irresponsibility of an industrialized, technological society toward the
natural world. When the attack did come, it was probably as bitter and uns crupulous as
anything of the s ort s ince the publication of Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species a century before.
Hundreds of thous ands of dollars were s pent by the chemical indus try in an attempt to
dis credit the book and to malign the author—s he was des cribed as an ignorant and hys te rical
woman who wanted to turn the earth ove r to the ins ects. Thes e attacks fortunately backfired
by creating more publicity than the publis her pos s ibly could have afforded. A major chemical