Silent Spring By Rachel Carson

Silent Springs…the title in itself layouts the plot of the story. Rachel Carson begins the story by describing a beautiful American town where townsfolk and farmers and wildlife all live together in harmony. Farms and orchards are bestrewing with maple, birch, and pine trees. Foxes and Deers live in the misty woods. The roadsides are filled with trees, ferns and wildflowers. Suddenly a strange blight occurs that changes everything. All the wildlife and farm animals die. People become ill, puzzling the doctors. The birds disappear. There are no bees to pollinate the plants, so no fruits can be produced. The once attractive roadside was now filled with withered vegetation. Carson goes on to say that this beautiful town she described does not actually exist, but that the individual environmental disasters have all happened in real communities. “What has already silenced the voices of spring in countless towns in America? This book is an attempt to explain.” (Pg. #3) In chapter two Carson begins to describe the source of the damages that were created in chapter one. Throughout earth’s history, living things have interacted with each other but not changed it. To a large extent, the physical form and the habits of the earth’s vegetation and its animal life have been molded by the environment. Only in present time has man acquired significant power to alter the nature of its world. This power has not only increased over time but has also changed in character. The most frighten of all mans assaults is the contamination of the air, earth, rivers, and sea with dangerous materials. These chemicals are the sinister and little recognized partners of radiation in changing the nature of the world. “Chemicals sprayed on croplands or forests or gardens lie long in soil, entering into living organisms, passing from one to another in a chain of poisoning and death.”(pg 6) to convey the grave dangers that these substances represent she introduces an analogy that pesticides are like atomic radiation-invisible, with deadly effects that often manifest themselves only after a long delay. In the less than two decade of their use, the synthetic pesticides have been so thoroughly distributed that they are truly everywhere. Every human being now has contact with dangerous chemicals beginning from conception. Synthetic pesticides are even present in mother’s milk and bodily tissues. Carson identifies a small handful of qualities that makes these new pesticides worse and more dangerous than their predecessors. The first is that they have a greater potency, they decompose slower and they have a tendency to concentrate in fatty tissues. Humans have become the villains of the earth. They destroy bit by bit without thinking much of how it can affect the future. Water, soil, and plants create the world that sustains humans and all other living animals. Without plants it would be nearly impossible for animal life to exist. But humans don’t take this into consideration, they use the plants when they are useful but immediately destroy them if they are of no obvious use in the moment. One example of man’s audacious approach to plants is the campaign in the sagebrush lands of the West, where people campaigned to destroy the sage and replace it with grasslands. “ If ever an enterprise needed to be illuminated with a sense of the history and the meaning of the landscape, it is this.”(pg 64) In our use of ever-increasing levels of dangerous chemicals in our environment, we have been traveling an easy road that will soon end in disaster. In her last chapter, Carson refers back to Robert Frost’s poem “We stand now where two roads diverge.” If we don’t change our ways now and take the road less traveled by, our world will slowly collapse on us. “The control of nature is a phrase conceived in arrogance, born of the Neanderthal age of biology and philosophy, then it was supposed that nature exists for the convenience of man.” (pg. 297)

Rachel Carson was a university-trained biologist. This book made her famous because of the way she speaks about nature and what man has done to destroy it. Silent Spring surveys mounting evidence that widespread pesticide use endangers both wildlife and humans. Pesticide is a broad term covering a range of products that are used to control pests. The more chemicals that are created to get rid of these so called “pests” the more we endanger ourselves. “…500 new chemicals to which the bodies of men and animals are required somehow to adapt each year, chemicals totally outside the limits of biologic experience.”(pg. 7)
Modern insecticides (chemical, biological, or other agents used to destroy insect pest) are even more deadly today. The majority fall into one of two groups of chemicals. One, represented by DDT is known as “chlorinated hydrocarbons.” The other group consists of the organic phosphorus insecticides. All these have one thing in common, which is the fact that they are all built on a basis of carbon atoms. “The basic element carbon is one whose atoms have an almost infinite capacity for uniting with each other in chains and rings and various other configurations, and for becoming linked with atoms of other substances.” (pg. 18)
This book relates to biology because it discusses how some of these chemicals are made. Chemists have discovered that it is possible to detach one or all of the hydrogen atoms and substitute other elements. For example, by substituting one atom of chlorine for one of hydrogen (in a hydrogen-carbon bond) we end up producing methyl chloride. If you take away three hydrogen atoms and substitute chlorine we end up having anesthetic chloroform. With this knowledge, chemists have begun to create synthetic chemicals. “Ever since chemists began to manufacture substances that nature never invented, the problems of water purification have become complex and the danger to users of water has increased.

“Silent Spring alerted a large audience to the environmental and human dangers of indiscriminate use of pesticides.” The story generated a lot of controversy over the use of chemical pesticides. Supporters of the pesticide industry immeadetly argued against her book once it was published. An executive of the American Cyanamid company complained “If man were to faithfully follow the teaching of Miss Carson, we would return to the Dark Ages and the insects and diseases and vermin would once again inherit the earth.” (classwebs)
It was not long after its publication that the public became aware of the dangers associated with pesticide use; in Texas twice as many people attended the yearly National Audubon Society convention where one of the topics was discussing how DDT has an effect on wildlife.The committee found that there were long-range hazards to man and other living organisms and that the government had not been protecting them. “After the committee’s report was issued, several pieces of federal environmental legislation were passed into law by congress, including the ban on DDT use in the United States” (classwebs) Rachael Carson’s Silent Spring helped to illustrate the correlation of living organisms and how humans are not separated from nature but connected to the earth as part of an “interconnected web of life”
“It is our alarming misfortune that so primitive a science has armed itself with the most modern and terrible weapons, and that in turning them against the insects it has also turned them against the earth.” (pg.297)

Source: Silent Spring By Rachel Carson
Source: http://classwebs.spea.indiana.edu/bakerr/v600/rachel_carson_and_silent_spring.htm