This year marks the 60^th anniversary of the publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring - which is arguably one of the most influential books ever written about our impact on water and the environment.

Carson’s book looks at the scientific and moral arguments for controlling the use of DDT and other synthetic insecticides. In a recent article for the University of New Hampshire, Dennis McFadden said she described "the peril posed by chemicals being widely spread over land and water and consumed, often unknowingly, by living creatures."

Silent Spring managed to cause controversy even before it was published in late September 1962. Three months earlier The New Yorker printed excerpts from the book prompting a backlash from the chemical industry.

The Velsicol Chemical Corporation, a major manufacturer of DDT, threatened to sue the magazine and the book’s publisher. Meanwhile various groups affiliated with the chemical industry questioned Carson’s motivation and the validity of her arguments.

She would spend the next few years courageously fighting against the use of pesticides, until her death from cancer in 1964.

Carson’s book had a significant impact on public policy. When then President John F Kennedy was asked during a press conference whether the Department of Agriculture and the Public Health Service would be looking into the risks of the widespread use of DDT, he responded, “since Miss Carson’s book they already are.”

In May 1963 Carson testified at Senate hearings considering legislation to regulate the use of pesticides. “Our heedless and destructive acts enter into the vast cycles of the earth and in time return to bring hazard to ourselves,” she told the subcommittee at the time.

In addition, her work is credited as being instrumental in the formation of the US Environmental Protection Agency (USEPA) - which ended government licensing of DDT shortly after it was created in 1970.

Thirty years after Silent Spring was published the USEPA stated that Carson’s book, “elicited a public outcry for direct government action to protect the wild; not for its future exploitation, but for its own innate value."

The agency's tribute continued, “In the process of transforming ecology from dispassionate science to activist creed, Carson unwittingly launched the modern idea of environmentalism: a political movement which demanded the state not only preserve the Earth, but act to regulate and punish those who polluted it."

Silent Spring is known as the environmental text that changed the world. In the face of criticism and corporate aggression Carson ignited an activist movement that not only questioned the direction of science and technology, but also demanded answers and accountability on behalf of the natural world.

In many ways Rachel Carson's work is even more relevant today if our planet is to survive and thrive.