Rachel Carson published Silent Spring in 1962, warning about pesticides such as DDT and their effects on birds, ecosystems, and human health. The book challenged chemical industry assumptions and reached a wide public audience. It helped energise the modern environmental movement.

Silent Spring is prose, but its title and imagery gave poets a haunting metaphor: a spring without birdsong. It encouraged later ecopoetry to treat scientific evidence, species loss, and ecological interdependence as urgent subjects for lyric attention.