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36. 寂静的春天 Fifty years ago, Rachel Carson wrote and published Silent Spring. Carson was ahead of her time. She said pesticides like DDT were damaging the environment and human health. Although the book became an inspiration for the environmental movement, the battle for the environment continues. In the 1950s, the U.S. Department of Agriculture was spraying more than a quarter-million kilograms of pesticides each year. Silent Spring, by Rachel Carson, revealed that pesticides like DDT were lethal not only for insects but for all living things. Silent Spring essentially told the reading public that human beings could alter the natural world in ways that were quite deadly and that it could be potentially lethal to human beings as well as to other parts of the natural world, said Linda Lear, the author of a biography on Carson. More than six million copies of the book have been sold in the U.S. Its been translated into some 30 languages. In the Washington suburbs, the house where Carson wrote Silent Spring is now a National Historic Landmark. Carson was a pathbreaker.In Silent Spring, she is writing in a voice that I call apocalyptic writing, added Linda Lear. She is trying to sound an alarm to get our attention. Thirty years after Silent Spring was published, public television, in its program The American Experience, called the book one of the most important of our time. | 
