Rachel Carson Silent Spring Summary

Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring revolutionized the American point of view concerning the environment. It rejected the notion that pesticides and chemicals are the right choice for “controlling” various animals that are seen as an inconvenience. Carson writes about the dangers of pesticides, not only to nature but man himself.
One of the thing that Carson accomplishes quite well is establishing credibility. She brings in a multitude of facts and real events that make it known that she knows what she’s talking about. Carson writes about a specific event in which a group of farmers came together to engage a spray plane to treat an area of river bottomland with parathion. She writes: “The problem could have been solved easily by a slight change

in agricultural practice—a shift to a variety of corn with deep-set ears not accessible to the bird—but the farmers had been persuaded of the merits of killing by poison and so they sent in the planes on their mission of death.” While first offering a real-life situation and then offering a solution to that problem that is not harmful, Carson shows that the solution to ending the use of pesticides is not a difficult one. She enforces this this with words such as “easily,” and “slight.” By bringing in all these facts, Carson is able to easily convince the audience that her stance on pesticides is the correct one.
Not only establishing ethos, Carson also appeals to the audience’s emotions with her diction. By writing with countless words relating to death such as: deadly, lethal, poisonous, and killing, Carson paints a more legitimate and moving picture of the truth of pesticides, which in turn causes the audience feel sad and/or guilty. These feelings of guilt and sadness from then on turn into determination to fix the problem that pesticides are causing. This is a successful method, seeing as after Silent Spring was published, various laws and legislatures were passed, banning such pesticides.
Throughout the text, Caron also asks multiple rhetorical questions such as: “Who kept vigilant watch to tell the innocent stroller that the fields he was about to enter were deadly—all their vegetation coated with a lethal film?” after explaining that there had been workers harmed after being sprayed with parathion, and that its easy for any other human to meet the same fate. Carson weaves these questions throughout her writing because she wants the audience to feel specific emotions and see that there is only one real answer to the questions she’s asking. This specific question brings about a feeling of pity and despair for an innocent stroller. These feelings of guilt and sadness, like stated before, cause the audience to feel responsible and wanting to make a change so that an innocent soul does not meet the same fate as others have met.
Overall, Carson writes a convincing argument while appealing to the audience’s sense of logic and emotions as well as causing the audience to really think. Her rhetoric strategies work together flawlessly to convince the audience of the fact that pesticides are not the way that problems with nature need to be solved.