Silent Spring was a controversial book, written by Rachel Carson and published in 1962, about the detrimental effect pesticides were having on the creatures that live in the sea.
It was controversial because the "facts" upon which she based her arguments were wrong (such as saying the Sargasso Sea had been poisoned by pesticide run-off so that animals no longer lived there), so scientists dismissed it as pseudo-scientific babble for the masses, but it was a wake-up call for the general public to become concerned about pollution of the environment. Thus, Carson was like Christopher Columbus, who was badly mistaken about the fact of how big the earth is but right on target that sailing west from Europe would turn out to be a good thing: She was wrong about how it was happening, and even about what was actually happening, but absolutely right that Americans needed to pay more attention to what they were doing to Planet Earth. She opened up the whole new world of ecology for us.