Silent Spring
“Why should we tolerate a diet of weak poisons, a home in insipid surroundings, a circle of acquaintances who are not quite our enemies, the noise of motors with just enough relief to prevent insanity? Who would want to live in a world which is just not quite fatal?”
“We stand now where two roads diverge. But unlike the roads in Robert Frost’s familiar poem, they are not equally fair. The road we have long been traveling is deceptively easy, a smooth superhighway on which we progress with great speed, but at its end lies disaster. The other fork of the road — the one less traveled by — offers our last, our only chance to reach a destination that assures the preservation of the earth.”
This is the book that launched the environmental movement in the United States. Rachel Carson addressed the world about the growing crisis of pesticide pollution (specifically DDT). DDT was thinning the eggshells of predatory birds, killing all the chicks. The silence that the title refers to is a world without birds. We owe so much of our understanding about the environment to Rachel Carson and to this book.