This coming May marks the 100th anniversary of the birth of author Rachel Carson, whose 1962 book Silent Spring alerted the public to the dangers of pesticides and helped lay the groundwork for the modern U.S. environmental movement.

Carson began her writing and science career in 1936 at the U.S. Bureau of Fisheries (today the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service). In honor of the Service’s most famous employee, the Friends of the National Conservation Training Center is launching the Rachel Carson Online Book Club. Starting March 1 and running through November 2007, participants will study Carson’s life and works. Each month features a guest moderator who will also offer his or her own comments on the text under discussion. Moderators include Carson biographer Linda Lear (Rachel Carson: Witness for Nature), Houghton Mifflin executive editor Deanne Urmy, and Cindy Van Dover, marine biologist and director of the Duke Marine Laboratory.

Besides Silent Spring, other Carson books to be discussed include Under the Sea-Wind, The Sea Around Us, A Sense of Wonder, and Always Rachel: The Letters of Rachel Carson and Dorothy Freeman, as well as a forthcoming anthology edited by Peter Matthiessen, Courage for the Earth: Writers, Scientists, and Activists Celebrate the Life and Writing of Rachel Carson (Houghton Mifflin, April 2007).

And if you want more Carson-related books to consider for a reading display or a book club, check out Priscilla Coit Murphy’s What a Book Can Do: The Publication and Reception of “Silent Spring“, Jim Lynch’s novel The Highest Tide, and The Gentle Subversive: Rachel Carson, Silent Spring, and the Rise of the Environmental Movement, a new biography by Mark H. Lytle. Both Lynch and Lytle will be moderators on the online book club.