Silent Spring
A few months ago I was talking to two friends who had just returned from a walking tour in Switzerland. It was impossible not to notice, they said, that the countryside there, where pesticides are banned, was far more alive than the fields and lanes of England with bees, butterflies and insect life generally. That our age has become increas- :ngly aware of this form of creeping death, which I feel has a, horror- painfully like that of fall- out, is due to the work of Rachel Carson who died on Tuesday at the age of fifty-eight. She became world-famous, of course, with the pub- lication of Silent Spring in 1962; but as long ago as 1941 she had published a book on oceanography, which she followed up in 1951 with The Sea Around Us. At the beginning of her career she studied zoology at Johns Hop- kins. She went on to work as a.marine biologist for the Bureau of Fisheries in Washington, and later became Editor-in-Chief of the US Fish and Wild Life Service—it was here that she became interested in the insecticide menace. Few people of our time can have lived so full a life. It is an unpleasant irony that she died in April.
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