First edition. Illustrated by Lois and Louis Darling. 8vo. Original green cloth, spine lettered in black, dust jacket price clipped. Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1962.
The book that launched the modern environmentalist movement, Silent Spring was first serialised in The New Yorker in 1961. It focuses on the impact of DDT, a pesticide that became widespread in use after World War II. Carson describes DDT as “the Elixir of Death,” writing that, “For the first time in the history of the world, every human being is now subjected to contact with dangerous chemicals, from the moment of their conception until death.”
The consequences of her writing were compelling: in the United States alone, the Clean Air Act (1963), the establishment of the Environmental Protection Agency in 1970, and the banning of DDT in the United States in 1972. The American and Canadian activists who founded Greenpeace in 1969 cited Carson as one of their inspirations. In a 2014 interview, Sir David Attenborough cited Silent Spring alongside Darwin’s Origin of Species as one of the most important scientific books to have been published.
A very good copy, some wear to extremities of jacket, price clipped.
