The publication of Silent Spring in 1962 led to the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency and a ban on the production of DDT in the United States. The book popularized the idea that human health depends on the health of the ecosystem as a whole, but Carson did not use the word ecosystem. She preferred the metaphor of an “intricate web of life,” in which a disturbance anywhere on the web sends tremors across the entire web. “Silent Spring,” Carson’s biographer Linda Lear writes, “proved that our bodies are not boundaries.”
