Key Takeaways:

• Explores debates over pesticides and industrial chemicals in the decades before Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, showing that these concerns had a long prehistory.
• Profiles early scientists, reformers, and critics who warned about toxins in food, workplaces, and ecosystems—often to little public attention.
• Positions Silent Spring as a catalytic event in a longer struggle over how much chemical risk society should tolerate and who gets to decide.