Carson's Silent Spring was an invented story, but it removed DDT from the market, thereby leaving malaria infected mosquitos unchecked...estimated 500 million people died because of her...the greatest mass murderer in history.

Silent Spring is interesting because most people miss the nuance of that book — a nuance that was critical to enacting smart pesticide policy — a smart policy that didn’t not include “total” bans. Here’s a doctor elaborating:

https://www.thedailybeast.com/how-rachel-carson-cost-million...

Teddy K really is the best read. But you could always read the classic Silent Spring if you want something more mellow. The more adventurous could try Running on Emptiness by Zerzan who AFAIK isn't a terrorist.

Silent Spring isn’t a scientific work[1] and has some serious factual problems. If you want to support banning DDT in an evidence based way you need to look elsewhere. It is on the other hand observably a rhetorical masterwork.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/05/health/05iht-sntier.1.600...

This is what I thought about posting. I've read a lot of books this year (45 books totaling 22,000 pages), the most important being: History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Silent Spring, The Feminine Mystique, The Grapes of Wrath, The Price of Inequality, The Happiness Hypothesis.

But, out of all that (which I had to go look up on my Goodreads), HPMOR is what came to mind, both an engaging story, thought provoking ideas, and a lot of pages to work with :).

129 books in one year is quite something. Is reading part of your job? I felt like I spent a decent amount of my free time reading this year, but I’ve completed only 23 books so far.

A very strong input into my book choices is reading the ‘classics’ in various domains. I will make frequent use of “Top 100 X books in Y” and “best X book of all time” queries.

I very much subscribe to the idea that selected books form a cultural and intellectual endowment of society to its members. Reading these selected books allows me to competently participate in society, as so much of our communication, institutional structure, and culture is downstream of these works. Examples of such works would be Shakespeare, Dickens, Silent Spring, The Intelligent Investor, Manufacturing Consent, Plato’s Republic.

If you haven't read it pick up a copy of Silent Spring by Rachel Carson which covered the indiscriminate use of pesticides and the effect on the wider ecosystem.

The awareness she helped raise contributed to the founding of the EPA and the banning of DDT.

Silent Spring was published in 1962.

Nope, humans were trying to figure out how to manage the consequences of nuclear weapons, which were judged to be a necessary strategy to end World War II to attempt to defeat fascism and save democracy.

Not "just to see what would happen" but to know how vulnerable our Navy would be to the very real threat of atomic attack from the Russians, and thus to responsibly inform strategy and tactics should that nightmare ever come to pass.

Testing decontamination also necessary to inform e.g. necessary fleet sizes in case of nuclear war -- could ships ever be reused or not? An existing shipyard is the logical place to do that, and unfortunately widespread environmental consciousness just didn't happen until the landmark publication of Silent Spring in 1962, more than a decade later.

Storing the contaminated sand on the ship and sinking it was a pretty reasonable thing to do at the time, not "just to use it as target practice" but to kill two birds with one stone.

Nobody's perfect, but you seem to really be judging people from several generations ago according to current societal standards, and completely misportraying their motives.

Banning DDT was one of the stupider things the government has done. The EPA studies showed no reason for it; the first EPA administrator just up and did it - against the professional scientists' recommendations. Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, which was the original "justification" for it was pure BS.

Thanks for caring. I was always weary of biocides but after reading Silent Spring about five or six years ago, I am regularly confronted with the appalling widespread use of poison. Between the aisles of enough poison to exterminate a wilderness in every hardware store, ludicrous plans to manage invasive species and pests, and an army of shills perusing social media, your comment was a brief moment of respite in an ongoing personal crises. You'd think the thought, "well if it's poisonous for one organism it's probably poision to others." Would occur to more people...

Meanwhile us weirdos will be appreciating our beautiful yards that we don't need to maintain, overgrown with flowers and bustling with life.

Your point of watershed books and ideas, particularly ones which more-or-less created the world which came after them, seeming trite in retrospect, can't be emphasized enough.

There are landmark moments (Einstein, Darwin, Newton, Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, the invention of blue jeans) which ... are largely just obvious in retrospect, but because they've defined the very frames through which we understand the world.

I'm not quite going to claim that ZAMM was all that, though I would argue that it was part of a revolution that could probably be scoped to include the period from the start of WWII to the first oil shocks of the 1970s, that created a world markedly different from that which came before.

Put another way, 1938 is probably closer to 1857 than it is to 2019, culturally, socially, intellectually, and philosophically, despite both spans being 81 years.

A dictionary definition of the word "pollution" in the 1930s would still have listed the original meaning -- referencing masturbation and of spilling seed on the ground (no, really: https://www.etymonline.com/word/pollution). The sense of "contamination of the environment" wasn't common until the mid-1950s. Today that's the principle association.

Books like Silent Spring had a tremendous impact, and it's hard to see them now as they were when published (1962). ZAMM happened to hit and shape the Zeitgeist of the 1970s in ways that are hard to appreciate now.

Which is still the belief in some parts of the world as well as some people.

Silent Spring was published in 1962. It brought environmental problems to mainstream Americans. As a result of new awareness the EPA was created.

What seems "obvious" now might not have always been obvious.

Lets not forget there have been over 2,000 (known) nuclear weapons test in the world. 1032 done by the US alone, most in Nevada. It is well known that these tests released massive amounts of radiation that affects human health. Clouds carried the radiation across the United States into the Mid-West and Northeast and deposited it with rain.[1][2][3][4]

[1] http://jama.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid=390963

[2] http://www.sciencemag.org/content/220/4592/18.abstract?sid=e...

[3] http://www.ieer.org/latest/iodnart.html

[4] http://www.americanscientist.org/issues/pub/fallout-from-nuc...

Rachel Carson's book Silent Spring is credited with starting the anti-DDT movement. It's been discredited and is full of junk science and needless corporation-bashing. Read the paper Chemicals and Pests which tears apart Carson's book. [1]

Checkout the New York Times article from 1962 titled "Fateful Voice of a Generation Still Drowns Out Real Science" [2]

A choice quote:

"Ms. Carson used dubious statistics and anecdotes (like the improbable story of a woman who instantly developed cancer after spraying her basement with DDT) to warn of a cancer epidemic that never came to pass. She rightly noted threats to some birds, like eagles and other raptors, but she wildly imagined a mass “biocide.” She warned that one of the most common American birds, the robin, was “on the verge of extinction” — an especially odd claim given the large numbers of robins recorded in Audubon bird counts before her book."

You may also want to check out the story of Professor Kenneth Mellanby who ate DDT for 40 years. [3]

Make sure to take a look at the scientific paper mentioned in this Times article. It concludes "DDT is practically harmless to humans who get it on their skins or breathe it into their lungs." [4]

[1] http://www1.umn.edu/ships/pesticides/library/baldwin1962.pdf

[2] http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/05/science/earth/05tier.html?...

[3] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/4264030/DDT-is-safe-just-...

[4] http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,812248,00.h...

Scardine, the book Silent Spring was published in 1962. That is 55 years ago. Since then there have been thousands of studies about the damage done by DDT. Start here:

https://www.google.com/search?q=damage+by+ddt&oq=damage+by+d...

You can easily track down a few dozen studies that will inform you about the damage.

There is a reason why nearly all the governments of the developed nations have moved to block or limit the use of DDT.

Are your fellow citizens not pissed about this? Is there similar environmental movements as in the US 60 years ago? (And don't be too discouraged; Silent Spring was published in the early 60s and Love Canal occurred in the late 70s I think. The Cuyahoga River caught on fire multiple times, the last spurring the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency.)