27, 1962, Rachel Carson changed her tone. But in the early 1960s, almost every American knew her name. Today, most people under the age of 40 have probably never heard of Rachel Carson. The New Yorker serialized it, critics praised it and the public loved it: more than 70,000 copies were sold as it rocketed to #4 on the New York Times bestseller list. In October 1955, Carson published her third book, The Edge of the Sea, a tour guide for the casual adventurer. Editors of the country’s leading newspapers voted Rachel Carson “Woman of the Year.” When the dust settled, The Sea Around Us had sold more than 1.3 million copies, been translated into 32 languages, won the National Book Award, and been made into a movie. Two months later, The Sea Around Us was #1 on the New York Times bestseller list, where it remained for 39 weeks: a record. On July 2, 1951, Carson published her second book, The Sea Around Us. “There is poetry here,” wrote one reviewer. Under the Sea-Wind told the story of Silverbar, a sanderling that migrated from the Arctic Circle to Argentina Scomber, a mackerel that traveled from New England to the Continental Shelf and Anguilla, an American eel that journeyed to the Sargasso Sea to spawn. Although written for adults, the book had a child-like sense of wonder. 1, 1941, Rachel Carson published her first book, Under the Sea-Wind. Unfortunately, the PBS documentary neglected to mention that in her groundbreaking book, Silent Spring, Carson had made one critical mistake-and it cost millions of people their lives.

In the early 1960s, she was the first to warn that a pesticide called DDT could accumulate in the environment, the first to show that it could harm fish, birds, and other wildlife, the first to warn that its overuse would render it ineffective, and the first to predict that more natural means of pest control-like bacteria that killed mosquito larvae-should be used instead. Although the program crossed the line from biography to hagiography, in Carson’s case, the unbridled praise was well deserved-with one exception. 24, 2017, PBS aired a two-hour special on Rachel Carson, the mother of the environmental movement.

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