Rhetoric and Response: The Cultural Impact of Rachel Carson’s Silent

Abstract

Rachel Carson’s 1962 Silent Spring is one of the most famous books of the twen- tieth century and one of the most politically and culturally influential in American history. Often compared to the nineteenth century anti-slavery novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which strengthened support for abolition, Silent Spring con- tributed to a new cultural understanding of the human place in the natural world as well as policies to clean up the environment.1 Rachel Carson therefore deserves credit for being the godmother of the Environmental Protection Agency, the ban on DDT and other pesticides, Earth Day, the 1972 Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act, and indeed of “Environmentalism” as a philosophy and political movement.