Silent Spring Evaluation

Kelsey Albergo

Prof. Santos

Eng. 102-016

30 October 2017

Silent Spring Evaluation

Silent Spring, a book written by Rachel Carson, was written to make the world aware of severe effects that chemicals like DDT were having on the environment, as well as the animal species that call the environment home. Carson doesn’t only show how the environment is being destroyed by these harmful chemicals. She also explains how we as humans would be affected if the chemicals had continued to be sprayed. Through her copious amount of research that she got on her own, as well as research that was given to her by fellow scientists, Carson perfectly shows what horrors could happen to the human race and everything around it.

The book as a whole, with its precise calculations and strong research, really hit hard on my ideas about our own effects that we have on nature. Around the time that the book was written and published, towns would spray pounds of DDT everywhere that there was any sign of insects. There was an idea that Carson touched upon that truly stuck with me: the huge effect that DDT spraying had on bird populations. Carson described a scene on a university campus in Michigan. She said, “Few nests were built; few young appeared...The spraying area had became a lethal trap in which each wave of migrating robins would be eliminated...new arrivals would come in, only to add to the numbers of doomed birds seen on campus…”(106). Carson described how robins would eat earthworms that were found on campus, only to then break out into tremors and convulsions. The only way that the worms, which are part of the natural diet of a robin, could kill one was if it was in touch with harmful chemicals. The DDT that was sprayed was in the dirt that the earthworms eat and the only reason that they didn’t die was because the eventually became immune to it. This should have been a clear sign to the government to stop what they were doing because it was causing unnecessary harm. There was nobody to advocate for the birds, but Carson did all she could to make sure that us, as well as every single species on earth, could live as long as they could.

Rachel Carson was the perfect person to finally put Americans in their place about their treatment of nature. She tried to get people to think about the environment through a different perspective and came up with different, less harmful solutions for the American government to try to do to “eliminate” certain species. Melanie Steele, a writer for indiefarmer.com, wrote her own review about Carson’s beautiful attempt at protecting our own world. She said, “In the remaining sixteen chapters she explains how this possibility, in her view, was a distinct probability, unless action was taken to reduce the use of recent manufactured pesticides and herbicides”. She caught your attention by describing this perfect world where birds are always singing and the grass is always a beautiful green color. Carson gets you hopeful that all of that could be true and then throws a curveball when she explains all of the harm we are putting on the environment. She got many people’s attention, including mine, when she said that it may not happen.

I would recommend this book to anyone that was looking for different ways to safely remove any kind of “pest” that may be destroying something you own. It may also really be helpful for farmers or scientists. It can help farmers safely protect their plants, while also protecting the many different species that live on their farm. Scientists may like the intense studies and research that went into this book and may want to use the book to build on her original ideas to improve the ways that we control insect population today.