In September 1962, Houghton Mifflin released a book that captivated the public, shaping our intellectual, political, and ecological histories to this day. Widely credited with launching the modern environmental movement, Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring immediately became a work of iconic status.

The book sparked controversy at the outset. But regardless of whether it is now venerated as sacred writ or dismissed as pseudoscience, the enduring impact of this runaway bestseller is undeniable.

In Silent Spring at 50: The False Crises of Rachel Carson, Roger Meiners, Pierre Desrochers, and Andrew Morriss edit a collection of essays that seek to reassess the book’s legacy with the hindsight of five decades. Its purpose, the editors write in introducing the volume’s distinguished academics, is to put Silent Spring in the context of its era, evaluate how the science it was built upon has withstood the test of time, and examine the policy consequences of its core ideas.

Wallace Kaufman begins the volume by relating Carson’s book to the larger intellectual story of her life, as well as the role she played within the environmental movement itself. “She was not its founder or its lifeblood, but first an inspiration, then, with Silent Spring, a catalyst,” he writes.

Pierre Desrochers and Hiroko Shimizu place Carson into the context of a broader network of activists concerned with environmental threats, showing that the book was “not the work of an isolated and pioneering mind that alone swam against an overwhelming intellectual current.” It was, rather, the latest installment in an already popular genre. Robert Nelson situates Silent Spring in the struggle between environmentalism and economics as America’s “civic religion.” While the book is gravely flawed from a scientific perspective, “judged by the standards of theology,” he writes, “it may fare better.”

Desrochers and Shimizu illustrate how the book’s central metaphor — a town where “no birds sang” — actually betrays Carson’s “blatant disregard” for certain data and her “selective silence” on the benefits of synthetic pesticides. Meiners then catalogs some of Carson’s more egregious sins of omission, focusing in particular on her “unbalanced speculation” when it came to rising cancer rates and her failure to adjust for factors such as tobacco use. “At the time she was writing Silent Spring, the causes of cancer and the relative role of various potential causes were widely debated,” he writes. “Yet Carson was silent on that debate.”

Nathan Gregory compares Carson’s concerns about maintaining the balance of nature to today’s more complex view of the resilience of ecological processes. Donald Roberts and Richard Tren, who have devoted decades to malaria control, review Carson’s “poetic vilification of DDT.” As they demonstrate, her fears surrounding the chemical — and the subsequent lack of investment in new insecticides — led to a devastating amount of human suffering. “The ultimate irony is that DDT remains a valuable and necessary tool in our malaria control arsenal precisely because no legitimate replacement has been found,” the authors write.

Meiners and Morriss examine how the book’s concern over agricultural pesticide use dovetailed with the larger political struggle in the 1950s to regulate U.S. food production, while Jonathan Adler explains how Carson’s arguments spurred a broader political push for the federalization of pesticide regulation in particular and environmental issues in general.

Larry Katzenstein illustrates the book’s role in popularizing what would later be termed the “precautionary principle” — a concept that calls for the elimination of risk without considering the foregone benefits, costs of compliance, or risk-risk trade-offs involved. Gary Marchant expands on this by examining “the legal legacy of the zerorisk approach” and its enduring — though unfortunate — influence on policymaking today. “The world and the risks inherent in it pose a much more complex and difficult challenge than the simple solutions of Carson’s era imply,” he writes.

Carson undoubtedly influenced American views of the environment in beneficial ways. Yet, up until this point, the mixed legacy of her work has been concealed by a dearth of critical assessments. “We have to look clearly at Silent Spring as part of our national conversation about the environment,” the editors write in the volume’s introduction, “rather than treat it as a holy text by a secular saint.” Silent Spring at 50 provides that needed clarity.