So, I spent 30 seconds of research on this issue and discovered that Carson herself never called for a ban of DDT in the book. She warned against indiscriminate spraying of large quantities of it. Something that science, even her critics concede, backs up. From wikipedia article on Silent Spring.
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Defenders of the book argue that Carson was sensitive to the problem of "insect-borne disease" and Silent Spring never called for the banning of DDT;[25] that when DDT stopped being used to fight malaria it was because mosquitoes had become resistant to it;[26][27] and that DDT was never banned by the US government or international treaty for use against malaria (its ban for agricultural use in the United States in 1972 did not apply outside the US or to anti-malaria spraying, the international treaty that did ban most uses of DDT and other organochlorine pesticides — the 2001 Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants — included an exemption for DDT for the use of malaria control until affordable substitutes could be found.[27])
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