Silent Spring
A book that created an entire political movement
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DDT is a pesticide taken into large-scale use after the Second World War and regarded as harmless to people and animals. The book is among the clearest cases of a single publication creating a field of policy: the Environmental Protection Agency was established in 1970, and the first Earth Day that year drew twenty million people. Carson's argument was not that chemicals are evil but that effects must be investigated before use and that the burden of proof lies with whoever releases the substance — the principle later called precautionary. The bald eagle and the peregrine falcon returned as a direct result.
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The biologist Rachel Carson wrote a book about how the pesticide DDT accumulated up the food chain and killed birds. The chemical industry attacked her fiercely. The book led to DDT being banned and to environmental protection becoming a field of policy in its own right.
Sources
- Carson, Silent Spring (1962)
- US EPA: DDT — Regulatory History
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