Rachel Carson Warns Of A Silent Spring Summary

The documents Rachel Carson Warns of a Silent Spring, 1962 and Huge Bennett Presses for Soil Conservation, 1947 show how American’s are destroying the environment and gives advice on how to properly save it before it’s too late. Rachel Carson gives a grime description of what will happen to our environment if we keep treating it the way that we do. Huge Bennett explains how there is only so much soil that is viable for farming, and gives a solution to help protect the land. The document written by Carson starts by describing a beautiful town in America that is very productive and has many desirable aspects to it, but “then a strange blight crept over the area and everything began to change”. Everything in the town starts to die for no apparent reason; nothing will grow anymore and there is no hope for this town to thrive any longer. Carson then says that this town is not real, but could easily become a reality for many parts of the United States.

Humans have for the most part lived in harmony with their environment, taking only what they need from it, but Carson points out that in an industrialized 20th century people are abusing the land, “most alarming of all man’s assaults upon the environment is the contaminating of air, part, rivers, and sea with dangerous and even lethal materials”. A good point that Carson makes is that “it took hundreds of millions of years to produce the life that now inhabits the earth”, through adaptation and evolution we have the environment that we live in today. The issue is that humans are harming the environment at a rate that it cannot adapt to. We do this to control nature