The hard thing in life is not to do the right thing. Often that’s a pleasure. No, it’s to do the right thing when everyone tells you it’s the wrong thing – and to keep on doing it even when they denounce you as a rabid nutter and social menace. It can destroy your prospects, your reputation, even your health.

These scarcely original thoughts flitted through my brain recently when I saw Amazing Grace, a worthy if slightly hearse-paced movie about William Wilberforce and his exhausting 30-year fight to abolish the slave trade. And they recurred, even less originally than before, as I read about the celebrations in America this month to mark the centenary of Rachel Carson’s birth.

Politicians and businesses are so keen to flaunt their green credentials these days – pathetically tokenistic though some of the gestures are – that one recalls with astonishment how little most people cared about “the environment” 50 years ago. Pollution was rife. Smog was ubiquitous. Waste was dumped wherever. The consumer was God, profits were holy writ, and “nature” regarded as a resource to be plundered at will. As Carson observed, “the right to make a dollar at whatever cost” was seldom challenged.

There was good reason for that. Challenging meant pitting yourself against zillion-dollar industries and a tame-poodle science establishment that legitimised dreadful environmental desecrations in return for reseach funding. If you were a lone whistle-blower you risked having your career shredded. This, remember, was the era of the Space Race and of Cold War paranoia, when to question the wisdom of Western technology was regarded as little short of treason.

It was into this bearpit that Carson – a tiny, deeply private woman – stepped in 1962, when she wrote Silent Spring. A marine biologist by training, she had a wonderful gift for popularising science in prose that was not only jargon-free but enchantingly lyrical. Her earlier books, about the oceans, had been uncontroversial bestsellers.

Silent Spring was explosively different. Carson had received a letter from a woman in Massachusetts claiming that DDT – an insecticide then widely used to protect crops – was killing birds. Many scientists would have dismissed the letter as the doomladen fantasy of a crackpot. DDT was perceived as a godsend, not a lethal weapon.

Not Carson. She dug around for facts. What she unearthed, not only about DDT but about the general use of chemicals to control or modify nature, made her more and more angry. She poured all that anger into Silent Spring. The book didn’t just lay into a powerful industry and the supine governments that allowed it free rein. It also expressed – perhaps for the first time in a format that the general public could read – what has become the mantra of the green movement: the notion that the natural world is a delicately balanced web of interdependent species that mankind tampers with at its peril; and the conviction that “quick fix” synthetic solutions for inconveniences in nature almost always have unexpected and often dire consequences.

Her book caused a sensation, not least because it evoked so poetically the beauties of the natural world before showing how we mess them up. DDT was banned outright (something that Carson never advocated), and public opinion alerted to the whole matter of environmental responsibility. Silent Spring became one of the very few books truly to have changed the course of history.

But this triumph came at colossal cost to Carson. The chemical industry bankrolled a campaign rubbishing her findings, her motives, even her prose style. In an overwhelmingly male scientific world her gender was used against her; time and again she was portrayed as a “hysterical woman”. She was financially and professionally vulnerable. Unmarried (she seems to have been a discreet lesbian), she supported an ailing mother and wayward adopted son. Her health was poor and she didn’t have the security of a university tenure. What she did have, tragically, was breast cancer – diagnosed as she was writing Silent Spring. It killed her, at 56, just 16 months after the book’s publication.

Today, Carson is rightly ranked alongside the likes of Galileo, Darwin and Wilberforce – doughty visionaries who had the moral courage to stand up for righteous causes which, though patently obvious to us today, shook and terrified the powerful establishments of their day. Not long ago Time magazine, which published a vitriolic antiCarson bromide in her lifetime, declared her to be one of the 100 most important people of the 20th century.

Yet her name still produces alarming reactions in some quarters – particularly when discussion turns to the vexed question of the role that DDT could play in the elimination of malaria, had it not been banned. Consider this claim, for instance, in an overwrought Sunday Telegraph leading article last September: “No book, including The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, has killed more people than The Silent Spring[sic]. We hope its pernicious influence is finally at an end.”

Well, I don’t. Carson didn’t get it all right. But as geneticists now meddle with the very building-bricks of life, Silent Springneeds to be read today more than ever. Our blind faith in science could still be the death of us.

Professional services

Like you, I imagine, I have been gripped by the court case involving two senior bank managers with Lloyds TSB and what’s been described in the press as “Preston’s largest brothel”. (How many brothels does that fair Lancashire town have? And who does the measuring?) I’m fascinated not so much by the rather mundane charges against the managers – they breached banking legislation designed to stop criminals from laundering their ill-gotten gains – as by the revelation that one of them visited their colourful clients’ premises no fewer than “12 to 15 times” to discuss a loan. Now that’s what I call customer care! Who said that banks these days don’t offer a personal service? Perhaps Lloyds TSB should feature its friendly Preston branch in TV commercials.

The future’s red

Progress is wonderful, isn’t it? A South Devon parish council is erecting a 2ft-high concrete pedestal for residents to stand on, so they can get signals on their mobile phones. I don’t wish to be unkind about Devon’s glorious weather. But I imagine that attempting to perch on an exposed concrete pedestal while trying to make a phone call could be an unpleasantly wet and windy experience at times – to say nothing of making you feel like a complete prat. Here’s a better idea. Why not build a red kiosk to keep the weather out? It could also be equipped with its own interior light and telephone, perhaps operated by coins, so that people didn’t have to faff around trying to get a faltering signal on their mobiles. I’ve even thought of a catchy name for my invention – “phone box”. Do you think it might catch on?

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