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Ecology Book Review On Rachel Carson's Silent Spring

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Ecology Book Review on Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring

Silent Spring is a book by Rachel Carson which traces the story of the destruction caused by the widespread use of chemical pesticides. Carson, a trained biologist and a former member of the U.S. Bureau of Fisheries after years of following this issue, received from her friend Olga Huckins about how pesticide spraying airplanes destroyed a bird sanctuary near Duxbury. This inspired what seemed to be a series of articles into a book that succeeded as a cry to the reading public to help curb private and public programs which by use of pesticides will end up poisoning life on Earth. Silent Spring is a scientific work written for the general reader. Its seventeen chapters explain in full detail, both the immediate and long-term effects, of pest-eradication programs conducted in post-World War II America.
Rachel Carson’s 1962 bestseller …show more content…

It is these characteristics that make even low-level exposure to pesticides so dangerous because it causes bio magnification. This gives a dose that is too small to cause immediate harm but is stored in the body and remains active for a long period, with each subsequent exposure the cumulative ‘‘body burden’’ increases, and along with it the chance of serious illness. These properties also put species at the top of the food chain at special risk; one of these species being humans themselves. Thus Carson brings out this irony by naming one chapter ‘Beyond the Dreams of the Borgias,” after the famous Borgia family of Renaissance Italy, who are said to have poisoned their dinner guests. The book has prepared the reader to understand the implications of this chapter. Wherein she presents evidence for the pervasiveness of poisonous substances in the human environment, including chemical residues on food. Subliminally she asks us at what cost will we stop this destruction in a mad race for development and

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Rachel Carson was a courageous woman who in the early 1960s called attention to the harms of indiscriminate pesticide use. In Silent Spring, a beautiful book about a dreadful topic, she explained how pesticides were accumulating in the food chain, damaging the natural environment, and threatening even the symbol of American freedom, the bald eagle. In spite of industry attempts to paint her as a hysterical female, her work was affirmed by the President’s Science Advisory Committee and in 1972 the EPA concluded that the scientific evidence was sufficient to warrant the banning of the pesticide DDT in America. In 2007, the Internet was flooded with the assertion that Carson was a mass murderer, worse than Hitler because Silent Spring led to the banning of DDT, without which millions of Africans died of malaria.

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