The miracle is that she lived to complete the book at all,enduring a"catalogue of illnesses,"as she called it.She was immune to the chemical industry'efforts to malign her,rather,her energies were fotruth as she saw it,She intended to disturb and disrupt,and she did so with dignity and deliberation.
after Silent Spring caught the attention of President John F.Kennedy,federal and state investigations were lauched into the validity of Carson's claims.Communities that had been subjected to aerial spraying of pesticide against their wishes began to organize on a grass-roots level against the continuation of toxic pollution.Legislation was readied at all governmental levels to defend against a new kind of invisible fallout.The scientists who had claimed a"holy grail"of knowledge were forced to admit a vast ignorance.While Carson knew that one book could not alter the dynamic of the capitalist system,an environmental movement grew from her challenge ,led by a public that demanded that science and goverment be committed individual can do to change the direction of society.She was a revolutionary spokesperson for the rights of all life.She dared to speak out and confront the issue of the destruction of nature and to frame it as a debate over the quality of all life .
Rachel Carson knew before she died that her work had made a difference .She was honored by medals and awards,and posthumously received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1981.But she also knew that the issues she had raised would not be solved quickly or easily and that affluent societies are slow to sacrifice for the good of the whole.It was not until six years after Carson's death that concerned Americans celebrated the first Earth Day and that Congress passed the National Environmental Policy Act establishing the Environmental protection Agency as a buffer aganist our own handiwork.The domestic production of DDT was banned,but not its export,ensuring that the pollution of the earth's atmosphere,oceans,streams,and wildlife would continue unabated.DDT is found in the livers of birds and fish on every mother .In spite of decades of environmental protest and awareness ,and in spite of Rachel Carson's apocalyptic call alerting Americans to the problem of toxic chemicals,reduction of the use of pesticides has been one of the major policy failures of the envirnmental era.Global contamination is a fact of modern life.
Slient Spring compels each generation to reevaluate its relationship to the natural word.We are a nation still debationg the questions it raised,still unresolved as to how to act for the common good,how to achieve environmental justice.In arguing that public health and the environmental justice .In arguing that publlic health and the envirnment,human and natural,are inseparable ,Rachel Carson insisted that the role of the expert had to be limited by democratic access and must include public debate about the risks of hazardous technologies.