Are pesticides good for you or bad for you? Does it matter? These questions worried a scientist called Rachel Carson Rachel was born in 1907 in a quiet town by a river in Pennsylvania, in the United States. As a young child she was interested in living things, and when she got older she became a scientist. For a long time she worked for the American government. She wrote a book called The Sea Around Us, and lots of people read it and enjoyed it. 
 But her work taught her that everything people, animals birds, trees, rivers, the sea is part of life; if we do something to one part, it may change another She decided to write another book about this, and in 1962 her book Silent Spring appeared. In this book she explained why she was worried about pesticides, especially when people use them over a long time. Millions of people read the book and began to think and