A Google home page doodle has celebrated the life of Rachel Carson, whose 1962 book "Silent Spring" is considered the founding document of the modern environmental awareness movement.
The Google doodle shows the late author holding her notebook as she stands in a world filled with animals and plants.
Born in 1907 in Pennsylvania, Carson trained as both a marine biologist and a journalist, for most of her career working as a scientist and editor for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service while also penning science features that appeared in the Baltimore Sun.
After writing several books on marine biology, including a best seller "The Sea Around Us," she turned her attention to environmental problems which led to the publication of "Silent Spring," in which she wrote of the fatal effects pesticides were having on global ecosystems, raising an alarm call that pushed the book onto a number of bestseller lists where it remained for 3 years.
Carson, who had received a diagnosis of breast cancer even as she wrote the book, succumbed to the disease at age 56 at her Maryland home in 1964.
She was posthumously awarded a Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1980 by President Carter.
Despite efforts by chemical companies to label Carson an "alarmist," the book's resonance with the public kick started a national environmental movement that eventually saw the creation of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
A concrete result of the book was a nationwide ban on the pesticide DDT.
In "Silent Spring" she had demonstrated how DDT and other pesticides went beyond just the killing of insects and were spreading into the entire natural ecosystem and the global food chain. While some parties have labelled Carson as an alarmist who decried the use of DDT, a researcher from George Washington University named Linda Lear said that Carson was only alarmed about the misuse of the chemical.
"Carson was never against the use of DDT," said Lear. "She was against the misuse of DDT." Lear also published a biography detailing the colorful life of Carson.
The possible follow-on effects -- perhaps even a world without birds -- led Carson to name her book "Silent Spring."
The science behind pesticides was inadequate when it came to predicting all of their effects, she wrote in the final pages of the book.
"The 'control of nature' is a phrase conceived in arrogance, born of the Neanderthal age of biology and philosophy, when it was supposed that nature exists for the convenience of man," she wrote.
"It is our alarming misfortune that so primitive a science has armed itself with the most modern and terrible weapons, and that in turning them against the insects it has also turned them against the earth."
