On September 27, 1907, Rachel Carson was born in Springdale, Pennsylvania, eighteen miles from Pittsburgh, in a farmhouse along the Allegheny River. She grew up with a mother who took her outside to observe nature and a father who supplied the land. She became a marine biologist, a federal scientist, and the author of Silent Spring — the 1962 book that launched the modern environmental movement.

Carson studied biology at Pennsylvania College for Women and earned a master's in zoology from Johns Hopkins. She worked for the U.S. Bureau of Fisheries, later the Fish and Wildlife Service, where she was one of two women in a professional staff of over 200. She edited scientific reports by day and wrote by night. Her first popular science book, Under the Sea Wind, was published in 1941. The Sea Around Us, published in 1951, won the National Book Award and stayed on the New York Times bestseller list for eighty-six weeks.

She used the money from The Sea Around Us to leave government service and write full-time. Silent Spring, published in September 1962, documented the effects of synthetic pesticides — particularly DDT — on ecosystems, bird populations, and human health. It was serialized in The New Yorker before publication. The chemical industry spent hundreds of thousands of dollars attempting to suppress and discredit it.

The attacks were personal as well as scientific. Industry spokespeople and media commentators described her as "not objective," "emotional," and "a spinster" who was "probably a Communist." Her science was correct. DDT was banned in the United States in 1972. She died of cancer in 1964.