I am a very strong environmentalist, but I don’t believe in fake science, and this was fake science in the sense that Rachel Carson took a small bit of knowledge and blew it up into a massive generalization that is actually untrue.

Heavy use of DDT had some well known effects on certain bird species, but Carson scared us about DDT (even in much smaller amounts) to the point where it has become totally demonized.

Nowadays, we prefer to have lots of human babies suffer and die with malaria in Africa than to use even small amounts of DDT to wipe out malarial mosquitoes. Yet I have read serious scientific commentaries by very well educated people who say that this is just political correctness started by Rachel Carson, not good science or good environmentalism.

To me, what her book stands for is the good and the bad of a really compelling “wake-up” book: the good part is that it wakes us up; the bad part is that the first person to raise an issue compellingly is often wrong about lots of the details (because they have not been researched yet), and can cause a lot of harm along with the good, because people keep hearing the old message and don’t bother to learn the newest science.