Books talk in a very interesting manner. Like trees, hills,
birds, and creeks, books have power to provoke thoughts, teach, and captivate
us. Rachel Carson wrote Silent Spring
(1962), a contentious environmental classic, while she battled breast cancer. In
the summer of 1963, when she was fifty-six and dying of her ailment, she
appeared before a Senate committee to testify on pesticides, upon being lambasted
by lobbying groups and some in government for being too alarmist in her book to
describe the adverse impact of pesticides on the environment.
A senator told Carson at the time, ‘every once in a while in
the history of mankind, a book has appeared which has substantially altered the
course of history.’ Published more than fifty-five years earlier, Silent Spring is extensively credited
with support launch the environmental movement. Carson argued that DDT and other
synthetic pesticides, and insecticides were being used in reckless quantities
without concern to their impact on the environment, animals, and human health. In
her book, she warned of severe consequences for the environment if their use
continued to propagate.
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| An illustration used in the first of a series of three articles - excerpts from Silent Spring - published in the New Yorker in 1962 |
Silent Spring starts
with a fable about a town - ‘a town in the heart of America where all life
seemed to be in harmony with its surroundings. The town lay in the midst of a
checkerboard of prosperous farms, with fields of grain and hillsides of
orchards, where white clouds of bloom drifted above the green land.’ And then, she
snappishly introduces a strangely ominous paragraph:
'Then, one spring, a strange blight crept over the area, and
everything began to change. Some evil spell had settled on the community;
mysterious maladies swept the flocks of chickens, and the cattle and sheep
sickened and died. Everywhere was the shadow of death.’
The ‘evil spell’ was DDT and its aerial spraying. The synthetic
chemical - invented in 1939 to kills fire ants and mosquitos in the US - not only
killed bugs but also threatened fish and bird population and could nauseate children,
Carson argued. ‘The most alarming of all man’s assaults upon the environment is
the contamination of the air, earth, rivers, and seas with dangerous, and even
lethal, materials,’ she wrote in her celebrated book. She suggests that we should
not pursue to control nature through chemistry, in the name of progress.
