Stony Brook, N.Y.

FIFTY years ago this month Rachel Carson, already a best-selling writer, published “Silent Spring,” the book many credit with inspiring the modern environmental movement. Nowadays, when environmental causes are often under political siege, it bears remembering that they were once extraordinarily popular, especially where both the book and the movement were born: in the suburbs.

As modern environmentalists like to remind us, the issue is a global one: climate change, pollution and nuclear radiation know no boundaries, and Public Enemy No. 1 is often the car-centric suburban lifestyle. But anyone trying to bring new energy to the movement could learn a lesson from how activists of the 1950s and ’60s picked up on, and played off of, concerns about pollution and preservation that pervaded suburban lives and neighborhoods.

Carson’s book had deep roots in the angst and activism that stirred in the postwar Northeast suburbs, in particular a 1957 lawsuit by 13 Long Island residents over DDT spraying. In 1966, academics and a lawyer sat down in a Long Island living room with a high school teacher, students and housewives to plan the trial that would give birth to the Environmental Defense Fund.

In 1970, only eight years after “Silent Spring” appeared, Americans ranked pollution as the country’s No. 1 problem, outpolling worries about Vietnam and civil rights. And worsening pollution registered most strongly neither in rural areas nor even in cities, but in suburbs.