George J. Wallace, a Michigan State University zoology professor, notices robins dying in convulsions on campus in the 1950s and traces the cause to DDT sprayed on elm trees to fight Dutch elm disease. His research becomes one of the case studies Rachel Carson uses in Silent Spring, the book credited with launching the modern environmental movement. The film reconstructs Wallace's methodical fieldwork, collecting dead birds and analyzing tissue samples, and the resistance he met from colleagues and chemical companies who wanted the DDT-bird link buried rather than published. Vintage footage and interviews with people who knew him fill in the period, including the strain the research put on his own life. Produced by Lou D'Aria and students at MSU's Knight Center for Environmental Journalism, the film grew out of a 2005 editorial by MSU professor Jim Detjen and has aired on all six Michigan PBS stations. It treats Wallace's discovery as the overlooked origin point of a fight over pesticides that Carson later made famous.