Before there was an environmental movement came Rachel Carson. Rachel Carson had always been a writer, but she also had an interest in Biology and Zoology.

As early as 1945, Carson and her close colleague Clarence Cottam had become alarmed by government abuse of new chemical pesticides such as DDT, in "pest" control programs, which were indicrimately killing animals without thinking of the problems the pesticides were causing. Also in 1945, she submitted an article to Reader's Digest on insecticide experiments happening close to her home in Maryland. In her book "Silent Spring", it was Carson who gave us a warning of things to come if the use of pesticides and chemicals were continued. "There was once a town in the heart of America where all life seemed to live in harmony with its surroundings ... Then a strange blight crept over the area and everything began to change ... There was a strange stillness ... The few birds seen anywhere were moribund; they trembled violently and could not fly. It was a spring without voices. On the mornings that had once throbbed with the dawn chorus of scores of bird voices there was now no sound; only silence lay over the fields and woods and marsh."