When she penned her 1962 book Silent Spring, marine biologist, conservationist and writer Rachel Carson (May 27, 1907–April 14, 1964) loudly, if perhaps unwittingly at the time, announced what’s been termed “ The Age of Ecology” and became a key figure in pioneering the modern environmental movement.

Today, when sustainability is on every corporate and cultural agenda and the deluge of news of environmental collapse is never-ending, it’s hard to appreciate just how radical Carson’s tireless advocacy was at the time – and yet, more than half a century ago, she presaged one of today’s most pervasive, inescapable concerns:

We stand now where two roads diverge. But unlike the roads in Robert Frost’s familiar poem, they are not equally fair. The road we have long been traveling is deceptively easy, a smooth superhighway on which we progress with great speed, but at its end lies disaster. The other fork of the road – the one less traveled by – offers our last, our only chance to reach a destination that assures the preservation of the earth.

With Silent Spring, which not only was the Inconvenient Truth of its day but also paved the way for the very existence of such contemporary efforts, Carson made more people take environmental concerns to heart than anyone ever had before. Particularly opposed to the use of pesticides, she withstood unrelenting attacks by chemical companies and effected a landmark change in pesticide policy, resulting in a nationwide ban on chemical pesticides like DDT and spurring the grassroots environmental movement that eventually produced the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

Environmental historian Linda Lear captures Carson’s legacy in all its tragedy and beauty in Rachel Carson: Witness for Nature, where she writes:

Rachel Carson was an unlikely person to start any sort of popular movement. She treasured her solitude, defended her privacy, rarely joined any organization; but she meant to bear witness. She wrote a revolutionary book in terms that were acceptable to a middle class emerging from the lethargy of postwar affluence and woke them to their neglected responsibilities. It was a book in which she shared her vision of life one last time. In the sea and the bird’s song she had discovered the wonder and mystery of life. Her witness for these, and the integrity of all life, would make a difference.

Sixteen years after Carson succumbed to breast cancer, she was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom – the highest civilian honor, also bestowed upon reconstructionsts Margaret Mead and Georgia O'Keeffe – by Jimmy Carter. So enormous was Carson’s cultural impact and so far-reaching her legacy that her story was even adapted in a children’s book.

Learn more: Rachel Carson: Witness for Nature | Wikipedia