The book Silent Spring by Rachel Carson, first published in 1962, awakened a passionate minority of environmentalists to the extent of the pollution problem in the United States. Carson chronicled the toll that decades of indiscriminate pesticide use, in particular DDT, which has since been banned, had taken on land, water, and human health. In an era when the environmental movement was still in its infancy, and notions of protecting the environment remained alien to much of the public, the pollution described in Silent Spring strongly affected many young readers. Former vice president Al Gore, who read the book as a teenager, recalls, “The publication of Silent Spring can properly be seen as the beginning of the modern environmental movement. For me personally, Silent Spring had a profound impact. . . . Rachel Carson was one of the reasons why I became so conscious of the environment and so involved with...