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Fifty years ago, Rachel Carson wrote and published Silent Spring. Carson was ahead of hertime. 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 theenvironment continues. In the 1950s, the U.S. Department of Agriculture was spraying more than a quarter-millionkilograms of pesticides each year. Silent Spring, by Rachel Carson, revealed that pesticides likeDDT were lethal not only for insects but for all living things. Silent Spring essentially told the reading public that human beings could alter the naturalworld in ways that were quite deadly and that it could be potentially lethal to human beings aswell as to other parts of the natural world, said Linda Lear, the author of a biography onCarson. More than six million copies of the book have been sold in the U.S. Its been translated intosome 30 languages. In the Washington suburbs, the house where Carson wrote Silent Spring is now a NationalHistoric Landmark. Carson was a pathbreaker.In Silent Spring, she is writing in a voice that Icall apocalyptic writing, added Linda Lear. She is trying to sound an alarm to get ourattention. Thirty years after Silent Spring was published, public television, in its program The AmericanExperience, called the book one of the most important of our time. | 
