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Rachel Carson was 55 and being treated for breast cancer while she wrote Silent Spring. She told almost nobody she was ill. Her reasoning was strategic. If the chemical industry learned she was ill, they would say her illness was what had made her write it. She was right about how they would fight. The pesticide industry spent more than 250,000 dollars trying to discredit her, over a million in today's money. A major manufacturer dismissed her as a fanatic defending a cult. Others called her hysterical, overemphatic, a bird and bunny lover, a spinster who kept cats and was therefore suspect. A trade magazine ran a cartoon of industry men giving evidence with a witch on a broomstick flying past behind them. Rachel Carson had no doctorate and no university behind her. She had spent years reading the studies nobody was assembling and putting them in one place. When she appeared before a government committee in 1963 to give evidence, she had lost her hair and was wearing a wig. She died the following year, less than two years after publication, at 56. DDT was banned in the United States in 1972. Five other pesticides she named have been banned or restricted since. The agency that did it was created in 1970, and she is generally credited with the movement that produced it. She did not see any of it. She spent her last two years being called hysterical by men who were selling the thing she was right about. https://t.co/FGQC8NUHPR