Silent Spring in the context of "United States Environmental Protection Agency"

Environmental science is an academic field that integrates the physical, biological, and mathematical sciences to study the environment and solve environmental problems. It uses an integrated, quantitative, and interdisciplinary approach to analyze environmental systems and emerged from the fields of natural history and medicine during the Enlightenment. It is considered interdisciplinary because it is an integration of various fields such as: biology, chemistry, physics, geology, engineering, sociology, and ecology.

Environmental science came alive as a substantive, active field of scientific investigation in the 1960s and 1970s driven by, the need for a multi-disciplinary approach to analyze complex environmental problems, the arrival of substantive environmental laws requiring specific environmental protocols of investigation, and the growing public awareness of a need for action in addressing environmental problems. Events that spurred this development included the publication of Rachel Carson's landmark environmental book Silent Spring along with major environmental issues becoming public, such as the 1969 Santa Barbara oil spill, and the Cuyahoga River of Cleveland, Ohio "catching fire", also in 1969.

Rachel Louise Carson (May 27, 1907 – April 14, 1964) was an American marine biologist, writer, and conservationist whose sea trilogy (1941–1955) and book Silent Spring (1962) are credited with advancing marine conservation and the global environmental movement.

Carson began her career as an aquatic biologist in the U.S. Bureau of Fisheries, and became a full-time nature writer in the 1950s. Her widely praised 1951 bestseller The Sea Around Us won her a U.S. National Book Award, recognition as a gifted writer, and financial security. Its success prompted the republication of her first book, Under the Sea Wind (1941), in 1952, which was followed by The Edge of the Sea in 1955 — both were also bestsellers. This sea trilogy explores the whole of ocean life from the shores to the depths.

A natural landscape is the original landscape that exists before it is acted upon by human culture. The natural landscape and the cultural landscape are separate parts of the landscape. However, in the 21st century, landscapes that are totally untouched by human activity no longer exist, so that reference is sometimes now made to degrees of naturalness within a landscape.

In Silent Spring (1962) Rachel Carson describes a roadside verge as it used to look: "Along the roads, laurel, viburnum and alder, great ferns and wildflowers delighted the traveler’s eye through much of the year" and then how it looks now following the use of herbicides: "The roadsides, once so attractive, were now lined with browned and withered vegetation as though swept by fire". Even though the landscape before it is sprayed is biologically degraded, and may well contains alien species, the concept of what might constitute a natural landscape can still be deduced from the context.

Arne Dekke Eide Næss (/ˈɑːrnə ˈnɛs/ AR-nə NESS; Urban East Norwegian: [ˈɑ̂ːɳə ˈdɛ̂kːə ˈæ̂ɪdə ˈnɛsː]; 27 January 1912 – 12 January 2009) was a Norwegian philosopher who coined the term "deep ecology", an important intellectual and inspirational figure within the environmental movement of the late twentieth century, and a prolific writer on many other philosophical issues. Næss cited Rachel Carson's 1962 book Silent Spring as being a key influence in his vision of deep ecology. Næss combined his ecological vision with Gandhian nonviolence and on several occasions participated in direct action.

Næss averred that while western environmental groups of the early post–World War II period had raised public awareness of the environmental issues of the time, they had largely failed to have insight into and address what he argued were the underlying cultural and philosophical background to these problems. Næss believed that the environmental crisis of the twentieth century had arisen due to certain unspoken philosophical presuppositions and attitudes within modern western developed societies which remained unacknowledged.

The Rachel Carson National Wildlife Refuge is a 9,125-acre (37 km) National Wildlife Refuge made up of several parcels of land along 50 miles (80 km) of Maine's southern coast. Created in 1966, it is named for environmentalist and author Rachel Carson, whose book Silent Spring raised public awareness of the effects of DDT on migratory songbirds, and of other environmental issues.

The refuge's parcels include protected areas between Kittery and Cape Elizabeth, including land in Wells, Kennebunk, Kennebunkport, Biddeford, Saco, and Scarborough.