Silent Spring, Loud Legacy: How Elite Media Helped Establish an Environmentalist Icon

Abstract

Rachel Carson’s 1962 book, Silent Spring, is widely credited with altering Americans’ environmental consciousness and changing people’s relationship with nature, science, and government. One means by which the book, which chronicled the dangers of pesticides, has attained and reinforced its symbolic status in collective memory is through newspaper coverage, which remained persistent through its first five decades. This study of 50 years of Silent Spring in two elite newspapers traces how news media can help elevate a situated artifact into an enduring icon with contemporary power—not just through thoughtful, well-researched journalism but also through numerous instrumental decisions by copy editors, agate clerks, and calendar compilers.