SILENT SPRING – RACHEL CARSON

Rachel Carson single handedly launched the American and global environmental movements.

The story of Silent Spring reveals:

How a courageous woman took on the chemical industry and raised important questions about humankind’s impact on nature.

Silent Spring was named the most influential book in the last fifty years.

Rachel Carson's book Silent Spring challenged the widely accepted notion that man was destined to control nature. Though experts accused Carson of being hysterical, challenged her credibility as a scientist, and launched a negative propaganda campaign against the book. Silent Spring remained on the bestseller list for almost a year, and the world began to take notice.

DDT, the most powerful pesticide in the world had ever known, was capable of killing hundreds of different kinds of insects at once.

A spray as indiscriminate as DDT can upset the economy of nature as much as a revolution upsets social economy. The large bird kills which had occurred on Cape Cod was the result of DDT sprayings.

Silent spring described how DDT entered the food chain and accumulated in the fatty tissues of animals, including human beings, and caused cancer and genetic damage. It remained toxic in the environment even after it was diluted by rainwater.

Carson concluded that DDT and other pesticides had irrevocably harmed birds and animals and had contaminated the entire world food supply.

As a result of the book and its reception, the Environment Protection Agency was established in 1970. DDT and PCB’s have been almost completely outlawed in the US. Most at risk from those pesticides, such as eagles and peregrine falcons, are no longer facing extinction.

DDT and PCB’s while not used in the US are still routinely produced here and sold to other countries. In the US they have been replaced by narrow spectrum pesticides of even higher toxicity. Pesticide use on farms alone has doubled (to 1.1 billion tons a year) and USA has increased pesticide production by 400%.

Rachel Carson remarked: ‘Man’s attitude toward nature is today critically important simply because we have now acquired a fateful power to alter and destroy nature. But man is a part of nature, and his war against nature is inevitable a war against himself…(We are) challenged as mankind has never been challenged before to prove our maturity and our mastery, not of nature, but of ourselves’.

SIGNIFICANCE/ IMPACT OF THE SILENT SPRING

·   Exposed corporate and government indifference to the issue of pesticide poisoning.

·       Led to banning DDT and PCBs in America.

·   Environmental Protection Agency was established in 1970 and Pesticide Regulation and Food Safety Inspection was moved to its auspices

·  Endangered species like eagles and peregrine falcons no more face extinction.

·  Signaled the beginning of the American and global environmental movement.

·       New way of thinking about earth-to see ourselves as connected to the earth