Silent Spring by Rachel Carson

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Recommended: Pesticides have detrimental effects on the environment

Our world is often referred to as our home. We need it to survive, and it provides us with the resources that we need to live our lives as comfortably as we do. Yet, we don’t often take the time to consider our impact on our environment. Let’s say our earth is “literally” a house, could you live in a home that has been routinely and permanently damaged, sprayed full of insecticides, and even torn apart for someone’s personal use? This Idea is represented in Rachel Carson’s book “Silent Spring”.
Rachel begins her book by painting us an image of a small quiet town. Keep in mind though, this town isn’t a real place, but is a parallel of our society. In this town, she describes the people living modest lives, and all is well. This is used to represent the calm before the storm, so to speak. The people start to notice strange things, such as birds dying and strange sicknesses. The people themselves are blissfully unaware of what is happening, and that they are to blame. This example is used in parallel to our world. We are unaware of the effects of Pesticides in the long term and if we don’t become aware of these effects, permanent damage will be done.
Our first question to ask ourselves is for what reason would we want to become anything like this poor town? In the second chapter, Rachel explains that this damage to the environment is caused by a war on insects. We’ve became so resolute on producing the most crops possible that we are willing to spray poisons as harmful as arsenic on our plants. Unfortunately, this will only have a short term effect on the insects before the insects build immunity to it. So the most we get from poisoning the crops is a short term reduction in damage cause by the insects, at the cost of ...

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...sk “who is safeguarding the consumer?” (p.153) in the words of Carson herself.

How funny that we should mention the consumer’s safety. How safe are the consumers when they go to the super market? Carson says in chapter 11 that people who lived before 1942 had no traces of DDT in their body. Yet now, people are eating food infused with DDT which has been found to cause negative effects on the body. Carson says that we have eras referred to as “the age of reason” and “the age of innocence”, but she fears that our age will be known as “the age of poisons” (p.157)
The poisons that we are introducing into our environment is causing us a new slew of health problems. We once had to worry about things such as the bubonic plague, but now, we have to worry about what Rachel refers to as “environmental disease” (p.169).

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