Environmentalism Series #4 of 4. Rachel Carson is often touted as inspiring the modern global environmental movement. In 1962, when Carson’s book Silent Spring was published, she was a fifty-five-year-old former government employee and an award-winning writer of oceanography books. She did not hold a university position, had no PhD, nor was she affiliated with any political organization. She did not consider herself a feminist, and by most accounts she had little taste for public controversy. Unbeknownst to most people, she was also living with advancing breast cancer, a fact she kept largely hidden from the public while she faced down the combined fury of the American chemical industry, the Department of Agriculture, and a scientific establishment that was furious with her. Carson was, as historian Linda Lear puts it, "an improbable revolutionary," yet she changed the world.

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