What point was Rachel Carson trying to get across to the general public in Silent Spring?

In her 1962 book, Silent Spring,
Rachel Carson was trying to alert the public to the dangers of pesticides.  She was
trying to make people more environmentally aware.

At the
time that Carson wrote the book, there was very little environmental consciousness in
the United States.  People were not really aware of the possibility that chemicals and
things like that could actually harm the environment.  Chemicals were identified with
progress.  DDT was an example of that.  It had been something of a wonder pesticide and
was very popular.

What Carson was doing was trying to
change this view.  She was trying to get people to realize that pesticides were capable
of causing harm and that they had actually been causing great harm to bird populations
especially.