Social Studies Programs - Americans through History

Natural / Environmental Change, Modern U.S. History: Rachel Carson

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Similar content addressed in SOLs: VS.1a-i; USII.1a-h; USII7.d, USII8a-b

Rachel Carson was a leading environmentalist, someone who supports the protection of nature, in the 1950s and 1960s. She wrote a famous book entitled /Silent Spring/ that warned about the danger of using pesticides, chemicals sprayed on plants to protect them from disease, on plant, animal, and human life.

• Here Carson holds a copy of Silent Spring.          
• Carson focused her cause on DDT, a pesticide that she believed hurt the local ecosystem and caused cancer in humans. Even though she did not live to see it happen, the United States officially banned DDT in the 1970s. The success of her book helped make the protection of the environment a national issue. She is seen here testifying before the U.S. Senate.
• Rachel Carson was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and has the state environmental protection building named after her in the capital city of Harrisburg.
• These loggers are sitting next to an old-growth Redwood in California. Thanks to the efforts of Rachel Carson in the 1950s and 1960s, issues of environmental protection, like the banning of harmful pesticides or preserving forests like those seen here, have become issues of national importance.
• The awareness which Carson raised about the environment promoted a more deliberate approach to such issues. Maps such as this, identifying air pollution throughout the United States, became important tools to help track how severely humans were impacting their surrounding environments.