Few books have been so influential as Silent Spring, Rachel Carson's compelling and heartfelt condemnation of the indiscriminate use of synthetic chemical pesticides. Since originally published in 1962, the book has prompted a U.S. presidential inquiry into the use of pesticides and later became a powerful instrument in the banning of DDT and other toxic materials in the U.S. and other countries (although not in the developing world where, controversially, DDT is still being used to fight malaria-carrying mosquitoes).
More than 40 years on, it's still a salutary (and chilling) experience to accompany Carson on her journey through those parts of North America and Europe where the scourge of chemical pesticides bit deepest, whether investigating the destruction of Canadian salmon or accounting for the robins of Michigan State University, which one year suddenly fell silent.
The book's impact on booming post-World War II USA, when Vietnam was just a name on a map, petrol was cheap and everything was bold, bright and beautiful, must have been devastating - and the chemical industry reacted with predictable ferocity, first attacking Carson's science, and then her credentials.
Silent Spring is a confronting read.
From the opening chapter, depicting a barren countryside of the future, the reader watches poorly understood chemicals choke waterways, fields and forests and learns how these materials work their way up the food chain, decimating wildlife along the way. Carson explains how organophosphorus insecticides can fatally damage the human nervous system, and how certain organochlorines can be linked with leukaemia and other forms of cancer.
But finally and most importantly, Carson emphasises that nature is a vast interdependency, and to meddle with one part of it can have alarming consequences for many others.
Silent Spring is an impressive work from many standpoints but perhaps most of all because it is the work of a scientist, working alone, who had the courage to confront a uniquely powerful and prosperous nation with the unpopular news that all in the garden was very far from being rosy.
It is a landmark in our development, a book that taught humanity a little more about how to think for itself and about how to criticise more constructively.
Rachel Carson was born in Pennsylvania in 1907 and worked for much of her life as a marine biologist before her concern about the widespread use of DDT immediately after World War II changed her life.
She died after a long battle against breast cancer in 1964.
