Among the top ten bestselling books in 1962 were the encouragingly titled Calories Don’t Count, perhaps to offset the more fattening title The Joy of Cooking. Although the bestseller list did demonstrate the continuing success of Bible sales with the inclusion of The New English Bible translation of the New Testament, more common on the list were easygoing, heartwarming, dog-mentioning books. Such as Charles Schulz’s Happiness is a Warm Puppy and John Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley. Only Helen Gurley Brown’s daringly titled Sex and the Single Girl hinted of the feminist revolution that was just emerging.
In September of 1962, however, a book would be published that would not have the appeal of those comforting books about food and dogs. Instead, it was a book that would force Americans to face unpleasant facts about dying birds, poisoned landscapes, and dangers to human health. Nevertheless, the book would make it onto the coming year’s bestseller list, and would become the most talked-about book during 1963.
That book was Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring. No matter how you tell the story of environmentalism in the U.S.—whether you focus upon science, society, or religion—any environmental history would be incomplete if it did not mention Rachel Carson’s book, which alerted the American public to alarming problems with a new breed of modern pesticides....
In that bestseller, Rachel Carson explained that despite the increasing number and quantity of pesticides being used, the limits to such a combative approach had already appeared.... Also, the new pesticides traveled up food chains, killing other animals, such as robins at Michigan State. Moreover, with natural predators thus reduced in numbers, the insect populations actually bounced back....
The pesticide controversy, which went on for decades, revealed that neither science nor religion could afford to ignore our life-sustaining connections to the non-human realm. So much so that, as strange as it might seem, the controversy would even lead to religion’s re-discovering two medieval Christian thinkers.
