Christopher C. Sellers is an associate professor of history at Stony Brook University and the author of “Crabgrass Crucible: Suburban Nature and the Rise of Environmentalism in Twentieth-Century America.”
FIFTY years ago this month Rachel Carson, already a best-selling writer, published “Silent Spring,” the book many credit with inspiring the modern environmental movement. Nowadays, when environmental causes are often under political siege, it bears remembering that they were once extraordinarily popular, especially where both the book and the movement were born: in the suburbs.
As modern environmentalists like to remind us, the issue is a global one: climate change, pollution and nuclear radiation know no boundaries, and Public Enemy No. 1 is often the car-centric suburban lifestyle. But anyone trying to bring new energy to the movement could learn a lesson from how activists of the 1950s and ’60s picked up on, and played off of, concerns about pollution and preservation that pervaded suburban lives and neighborhoods....
