Rachel Carson's Silent Spring

This is a very comprehensive history of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, its author, and associated major events before, during, and after it was written. After you have have finished with these materials, try to summarize how you think this book has helped to shape the history of the environment, and the environmental movement over the past 50 years.

Acknowledgments

First, I must thank Kimberly Coulter and Christof Mauch of the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society, who invited me to author this website and provided continued support, aided by Andreas Grieger. Thanks, too, to Randy McBee, chair of the History Department of Texas Tech University, for generous departmental support. Kerry Fine, my research assistant, did excellent work locating many sources and images and handling most of the paperwork and negotiations with owners of images. She also researched the literary and poetic responses to Silent Spring. A visit to the Beinecke Library at Yale University was very helpful, made more so by the kind assistance of Karen Nangle, Louise Bernard, and Naomi Saito. I have been looking at the international reception of Silent Spring off and on for a decade, and gratefully acknowledge comments from Peter Coates, Jacqueline Cramer, Jens Ivo Engels, Nils M. Franke, William Gray, Marcus Hall, Maril Hazlett, Kai Hünemörder, Andrew Jamison, Martin Kylhammar, Linda Lear, and Joachim Radkau.

Mark Stoll

Image of Mark Stoll

Exhibition author Mark Stoll in front of the Aldo Leopold Shack

Mark Stoll is associate professor of history at Texas Tech University in Lubbock, Texas. He researches how religion has influenced ideas about nature and the environment. His book, Protestantism, Capitalism, and Nature in America, was published in 1997. He has recently published chapters on the influence of religion on Rachel Carson and E. O. Wilson as well as articles about John Milton's influence on the idea of national parks and the Calvinist origins of the American conservation movement. He edited a book series for ABC-Clio on world environmental history entitled "Nature and Human Societies" and with Dianne Glave co-edited "To Love the Wind and the Rain": African Americans and Environmental History.


Source: Mark Stoll, http://www.environmentandsociety.org/exhibitions/rachel-carsons-silent-spring
Creative Commons License This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 License.