Carson's Silent Spring: A Reader's Guide
Ebook
Overview
Silent Spring is a watershed moment in the history of environmentalism, credited with launching the modern environmental movement. In synthesizing a jumble of scientific and medical information into a coherent argument, Carson successfully challenged major chemical industries and the idea that modern societies could and should exert mastery over nature at any cost. Her critique remains salient today.
This book provides the first in-depth analysis, contextualisation and overview of Silent Spring, a critical work in the history of environmentalism, surveying its lasting impact on the environmentalist movement in the last fifty years.
This book examines Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring and its legacy as the foundation of a shift in society’s approach to climate change and the environment.
Contextualizes Carson’s primary contributions to environmental understanding
It provides an overview of Rachel Carson’s 1962 best-seller
It locates Silent Spring and Carson in the political and environmental milieu of the period
Introducing Silent Spring: Hitchcock, Bees, and the Syrian Civil War
1. Getting to Silent Spring
2. The Post-War Machine in the Garden
3. Needless Havoc: Carson’s Case Against Pesticides
4. One in Every Four
5. Alternatives
6. Responses to Silent Spring
Notes
Sources for Further Reading & Research
Bibliography
Index
29 years ago the Bhopal tragedy…showed how right Rachel Carson was. Now the ‘elixirs of death’ come in new forms… Joni Seager’s [book] is a vital and timely reminder of Rachel Carson’s wake up call to humanity that a chemical war can never be won.
Pacy, thought-provoking and challenging…This will become a set text for environmentalists and students of the natural world, but I’d urge that anyone interested in understanding the importance of Carson’s life and vital insight, and its relevance to the world 50 years on, should read Joni Seager’s book.
Silent Spring was a blockbuster that changed the world. Today, Carson’s message has been politicized, misinterpreted and ignored. Joni Seager brilliantly explicates the times in which Carson wrote and shows why Silent Spring remains an essential text for the 21st century.
- Title: Carson's Silent Spring: A Reader's Guide
- Author: Joni Seager
- Series: Reader's Guides
- Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
- Print Publication Date: 2014
- Logos Release Date: 2024
- Pages: 176
- Language: English
- Resources: 1
- Format: Digital › Ebook
- ISBNs: 9781441128997, 9781441130662, 1441130667, 1441128999
- Resource ID: LLS:9781441128997
- Resource Type: Monograph
- Metadata Last Updated: 2025-04-22T10:15:23Z
Joni Seager is Professor and Chair of Global Studies at Bentley University, Boston, USA. She is a feminist geographer and environmentalist.