A Rhetorical Analysis Of After Silent Spring By Rachel Carson

Rachel Carson was often revered as one of the three leaders of the environmental movement in the United States, along with Henry David Thoreau and John Muir. Carson wrote Silent Spring in a pivotal moment in the 1960s, when the almost unregulated push of industry after World War 2 was having a devastating impact, not only on the environment, but also on the health of the people. She was a naturalist but also a scientist who has worked for the United States government, the Bureau of Fisheries and Wildlife. After Silent Spring was published in 1962, it had an immediate broader appeal regarding the environment management and was considered the beginning of public awareness of environmental concerns.

The reason for the book being titled Silent

Her style throughout the book helps to contribute to the argument and is affable, lively and engaging. The overall pattern of Rachel Carson's book is deductive reasoning because she makes generalizations using supportive evidence throughout the majority of the book.

With the use of rhetorical strategies Carson was able to get her point across and show the necessity for changing the way the environment is treated by mankind. Carson uses several rhetorical strategies to get her argument across like imagery, pathos, logos, anecdotes, rhetorical questions, examples, diction and expert testimonies. The strategy Carson used the most was pathos, she uses it to be persuasive and invoke repulsion in the reader directed towards the deaths of so many innocent animals. For example, in chapter eight when the farmer did not like the black, red winged bird and Carson suggested the use of different corn, but instead the farmer sprayed DDT, resulting in the death of the majority of the black, red winged birds (Carson, 126). Carson uses

Carson was violently assailed by threats of lawsuits and accusations, including claims that this meticulous scientist was a "hysterical women" unqualified to write such a book. The chemical industry and its allies in government fought back against Silent Spring. Critics dismissed the book as hysterical and one-sided. Carson was described as an agent of the far left and probably communist. Carson's critics saw Silent Spring as inimical to the Untied States economic interest and therefore fundamentally un-American. Here was the source of the bitter, right/left divide that has animated the environment debate ever since. On one side are the voices of science and those concerned with the balance of nature; on the other side stand economic incentives and the powers that are the massed might of the establishment. Manufactured attacked Carson. Carson was also slandered by former secretary of agriculture, Ezra Taft Benson, as a communist because of her personal life, including her married status. Debates which were begun by Silent Spring were the beginning of some of the environmental legislation and the government agencies, we have today in order to regulate the use of the