Read about the other books on the list.Silent Spring
Rachel Carson, 1962
At the other end of the savagely exploitative century from Melville came a book that woke up the world, or at least spoke loud and clear to its sleepwalking citizens. Carson’s account (she was a research biologist) of the devastating impact of the accumulation of insecticides up food chains and into ecosystems was angry and brilliant. What had blithely been thought of as the balance of nature was seen to be increasingly skewed. Here was an early but decisive news bulletin from the anthropocene – the world where just one species was calling the shots and with disastrous effect.
Silent Spring made a list of the best books on global warming at the Guardian in 2009. It is among Gill Lewis's ten top birds in books and John Kerry's five top books about progressivism.
--Marshal Zeringue
Posts
