Rachel Carson, author of one of the most influential eco-manuals ever written, has been picked for today's Google Doodle, on the admittedly slightly random occasion of her 107th birthday.

Anyone unfamiliar with Carson's book The Silent Spring should take a look at this paean by Margaret Atwood, who honoured her in the second part of her Oryx and Crake trilogy, The Year of the Flood, as Saint Rachel of All Birds.

As Atwood wrote on the 50th anniversary of Silent Spring, the book is "considered by many the most important environmental book of the 20th century. Its subject was the human poisoning of the biosphere through the wholesale deployment of a myriad new 20th-century chemicals aimed at pest and disease control.

"Carson was already the most respected nature writer in the United States, and a pioneer in that field. She knew how to explain science to ordinary readers in a way that they could understand; she knew also that if you don't love a thing you won't save it, and her love for the natural world shines through everything she wrote."

Her enthusiasm was echoed by science writer Tim Radford, in a rereading of Silent Spring. "If you had to choose one text by one person as the cornerstone of the conservation movement, the signal for politically savvy environmental activism, and the beacon of worldwide lay awareness of ecological systems, Silent Spring would be most people's clear choice," he wrote. "Its impact was immediate, far-reaching and ultimately life-enhancing: it earned her a posthumous presidential medal and put her face on the 17 cent US postage stamp."

But as Radford went on: "It also earned her sustained vitriolic assault from the chemical industry and a claim from a former US Secretary of Agriculture that (because she was unmarried) she was 'probably a communist': this, in a McCarthyite world, was almost the ultimate in character assassination."