Silent Spring presented facts that brought its readers to the threshold of difficult questions about how pest control might be guided by biological knowledge and democratically determined priorities, rather than the logic of capital accumulation. But Carson's avoidance of politics, abetted by her conceptions of nature, helped lead them away again. Through these she taught her readers to see pesticide problems as resulting from oversight and carelessness, or at the most arrogance, rather than from greed or systemic structural factors. By casting the problem of pest control as primarily an issue of achieving a harmonious relationship to "nature," with little reference to the social criteria embedded in the term, nor the changes in social institutions necessary to achieve this harmony, Carson stripped her book of overtly political analysis or claims. She seemed to believe that it was enough to present the facts and let public opinion take...