Many of the personal attacks on Carson were gender specific, shaped by mid-century perceptions about women: their feeble mental capacities, their bleeding-heart sentimentality, their tendency towards 'hysteria'. Rachel Carson discusses Silent Spring during a CBS interview in 1962.

Yet Silent Spring never advocated an outright ban on pesticides: only careful testing and informed use, in contrast to the scorched-earth policies that had been pursued, with many disastrous outcomes. Multiple attempts were made to destroy not only Carson's scientific credibility but also her personal reputation: she was a fanatic, she was a 'bunny hugger', she was a dangerous reactionary who would drag modern society backwards into a new Middle Ages filled with pests, vermin, crop destruction and lethal diseases. The book also met with furious resistance, chiefly from the big chemical companies and the scientists in their employ. The impact was enormous – many groups, pieces of legislation, and government agencies were inspired by it – and both its main insights remain central today. She was able to combine a simple and dramatic presentation with a formidable array of backup statistics, and to forge a call to specific action. For Silent Spring – which she already knew would be her last tilt at the windmill – she polished all her rhetorical weapons, and synthesised a wide range of research. She knew how to explain science to ordinary readers in a way that they could understand she knew also that if you don't love a thing you won't save it, and her love for the natural world shines through everything she wrote. Carson was already the most respected nature writer in the United States, and a pioneer in that field. Its subject was the human poisoning of the biosphere through the wholesale deployment of a myriad new 20th-century chemicals aimed at pest and disease control. This year marks the 50th anniversary of the publication of Rachel Carson's momentous book, Silent Spring, considered by many the most important environmental book of the 20th century.

She fully deserved beatification, and now she has it: in the God's Gardeners hagiography, she is Saint Rachel of All Birds.

A silent spring