Editors' Summary: Twenty-five years ago this month, the New Yorker magazine published excerpts from a landmark book that would be published later that year—Silent Spring. Rachel Carson's eloquent yet chilling chronicle of the hazards of synthetic pesticides quickly became the starting point for any analysis of the subject and was one of the major forces behind the development of the environmental movement. Justice William O. Douglas called it "the most important chronicle of this century for the human race." In this Dialogue, the authors speculate what Rachel Carson would think if she were alive on the 25th anniversary of Silent Spring.