September 27 · This Day in America
On September 27, 1962, a quiet marine biologist with terminal cancer publishes a book that opens with a fable: an American town where one spring the birds simply do not return. Rachel Carson's "Silent Spring" lays out, in careful and unhurried prose, what unchecked pesticides like DDT were doing to the water, the soil, the eggshells, and eventually to us. The chemical industry came for her with everything it had, calling her hysterical, unscientific, a woman out of her depth. She had the facts, and she had written them so clearly that an ordinary citizen could understand them. The book changed the country. It led to a national ban on DDT, to the Environmental Protection Agency, to the idea — radical then, obvious now — that the natural world is not infinite and not free. One book. One honest voice. A whole way of seeing.
Source: www.loa.org
Also on this day · 1777
With the British marching on Philadelphia, the Continental Congress flees west and, on September 27, 1777, holds a single session in the courthouse at Lancaster, Pennsylvania. For one day, this small town is the seat of the infant United States. The delegates, judging Lancaster still too close to the enemy, crossed the Susquehanna the next morning and reconvened in York. The capital that day was barely a desk and a quorum — and it held.
Source: history.state.gov
“What has already silenced the voices of spring in countless towns in America?”Rachel Carson, Silent Spring, 1962