book review of silent spring

Silent Spring
Rachel Carson
Penguin Books in Association with Hamish Hami, 2000
1 336pp., £9.99, ISBN-10: 0141184949

“The sedge is wither’d from the lake, and no birds sing.” I was pleasantly surprised when I firstly opened the title page of Silent Spring. This line of John Keats’s La Belle Dame sans Merci which is one of my favourite poetries seems to be a poetic description of the theme of the book. However, unlike the artistic conception of sadness created by the poet in that ballad, “no birds sing” in this book refers to the scene of the world around us after we blindly using chemical pesticides and contaminating natural environment, which is more realistic and cruel.

Silent Spring written by Rachel Carson is considered as a pivotal work enabled us to gain a more comprehensive understanding of ecological systems and changed the way we looked at the world. Needless to say, Rachel Carson is great. She was something rare of those times—— a professional American marine biologist who was also a brilliant writer.

Published in 1962, the book is widely thought to help to launch the contemporary American environmental movement. After World War II, as Rachel wrote in the chapter Nature Fights Back:“In 1956, the United States Forest Service sprayed some 885,000 acres of forested lands with DDT”. Late in the 1950s, Carson turned her attention to conservation, especially environmental problems that she believed were caused by synthetic pesticides. Then she wrote Silent Spring, which drew the unprecedented attention of American public. She divided the book into seventeen chapters logically on where toxins come from, how they accumulate and spread, and what detrimental effects on food chain, animals, particularly on birds, and human health, alerting the world to the hazardous legacy of pesticides.

The influence of this masterpiece was immediate, controversial, profound and lasting. According to The Guardian, it must have been one of the first truly popular books to introduce the ideas of the food chain and of the web of lives on earth. To some extent, it was also a prominent critique of free-market capitalism (Radford, 2011).

“It has been called the most controversial book of the year” (Sevareid, 2007). “After reading "Silent Spring," both President Kennedy and Congress launched investigations into the safety of pesticides, leading to new laws restricting which chemicals could be used and how DDT was banned outright” (Elliott, 2007).

In the process of reading this book, I was thinking about its controversy as well as the relationship between nature environment and the human price. In my view, environmental issue is an eternal and universal topic which will always be closely related to our world, and will be increasingly critical. That is why this book, till now, as Debbie Elliott who is a journalist of NPR said, is still making noise.

“To have risked so much in our efforts to mould nature to our satisfaction and yet to have failed in achieving our goal would indeed be the final irony”. Carson pointed out that nature is not so easily moulded and that the insects are finding ways to circumvent our chemical attacks on them. The fact is that our chemical attack is weakening the defences inherent in the environment itself. I totally agree with this. We scarcely aware of the protection provided by our natural enemies until it founders. A controversial new study of honeybee deaths in 2012 has deepened a bitter dispute over whether the developed world’s most popular pesticides are causing an ecological catastrophe. One of the researchers Chensheng Lu, a biologist of Harvard University, said that“Our result replicates colony collapse disorder as a result of pesticide exposures. We need to look at our agriculture policy and see if what we’re doing now is sustainable”.

Micbelle Mart (2010) said the most revolutionary aspect of Carson’s argument was her challenge to readers to understand that they were part of the “balance of nature”. That is pretty penetrating. Carson said the balance of nature is not the same today as in Pleistocene times, but still complex and precise. Man is part of nature. We have seen that pesticides now contaminate soil, water, and food, that they make our streams fishless and our gardens silent and birdless. But for public health, the biological effects of chemicals are cumulative over long periods of time, and that the hazard to the individual may depend on the sum of the exposures received throughout his lifetime.

“Carson and her work came under attack from the chemical and agricultural industries, which dismissed her as a, quote, "hysterical woman who is unqualified as a scientist." And 45 years later, Carson can still spark controversy” (Elliott, 2007).

I suppose chemical pesticides always serve as an essential role in people 's development and agricultural production, but they also bring about lots of problems because of abusing. These problems have never been solved properly. Complete prohibition of using them is unrealistic, but as Carson wrote, it is not her contention that chemical insecticides must never be used. We do must change our philosophy, abandon our attitude of human superiority and admit that in many cases in natural environments we find ways and means of limiting populations of organisms in a more economical way than we can do it ourselves.

Before reading this book, I was quite ignorant about this field. But Carson’s descriptions really had me on the edge of my seat. I was mesmerized by her sentences. I cannot believe that a book focusing on chemistry and biology could be poetically and lyrical written. It is full of humanistic care and it should be immortal. As The Daily Telegraph commented,“Carson’s books brought ecology into popular consciousness. Despite condemnation in the press and heavy-handed attempts by the chemical industry to ban the book, she succeeded in creating a new public awareness.”

REFERENCES
Mart, M. (2010) ‘Rhetoric and Response: The Cultural Impact of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring’, Left History, June, pp. 31-34.

Radford, T. (2011) ‘Silent Spring By Rachel Carson’, The Guardian, [Online], Available: http://www.theguardian.com/science/2011/sep/30/silent-spring-rachel-carson-review§[30 Sep 2011].

Elliott, D. (2007) ‘Carson’s Silent Spring Still Making Noise’, NPR, [Online],Available:http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=10486240§ [27 May 2007].

Keim, B. (2012) Controversy Deepens Over Pesticides and Bee Collapse, [Online], Available: http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2012/04/neonicotinoids-colony-collapse/§ [04 Jun 2012].

References: Mart, M. (2010) ‘Rhetoric and Response: The Cultural Impact of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring’, Left History, June, pp. 31-34. Radford, T. (2011) ‘Silent Spring By Rachel Carson’, The Guardian, [Online], Available: http://www.theguardian.com/science/2011/sep/30/silent-spring-rachel-carson-review§[30 Sep 2011]. Elliott, D. (2007) ‘Carson’s Silent Spring Still Making Noise’, NPR, [Online],Available:http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=10486240§ [27 May 2007]. Keim, B. (2012) Controversy Deepens Over Pesticides and Bee Collapse, [Online], Available: http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2012/04/neonicotinoids-colony-collapse/§ [04 Jun 2012].