That year saw the publication of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, first in serial form in the New Yorker and then as a Houghton Mifflin best seller. Ideas are needed-better yet a whole world view-and many environmental ideas first crystallized in 1962.
But pollution alone does not an agency make. Surely no factor was more pivotal in the birth of EPA than decades of rampant and highly visible pollution. Like any other birth, EPA's needed progenitors, and a family tree stretching back for years. The official birthday of EPA is December 2, 1970.
