Silent Spring by Rachel Carson: Analysis

Imagine a town without birds, without trees, and without beauty. Imagine a town where there is death and destruction all around you. Harmful disease-carrying bugs multiply in astounding numbers. The water is not fit to drink, and the food slowly deposits poison into whomever decides to eat. This is the picture that Rachel Carson paints in her book, Silent Spring.

Carson begins by describing exactly these effects in the first chapter, creating strong images and drawing the reader in. As the book continues, she gives various examples of how insecticides and herbicides are not only unsuccessful, but actually very costly and damaging. She explains also about the biological controls which can be substituted, and how these are less expensive and much more efficient.

Insecticides and herbicides, she explains, destroy more than bugs and weeds. The poisons within them have the power to poison insects, small animals, larger animals, and even people. They are indiscriminant killers. Dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethan e(henceforth to be referred to as DDT) is one example of such a poison. In Carson's time, it was a commonly used pesticide. However, she explains the major effect it has on birds; in any DDT sprayed area, birds are virtually wiped out. One memorable example she mentions is when DDT was sprayed at Michigan State University in an attempt to combat Dutch elm disease. The campus was usually flooded by robins and yet, by the next spring, dead and dying robins were everywhere. What appears to have happened is that the poison, settling into the leaves and bark on the tree fell to the ground with the leaves. Then earthworms started their work of eating the leaves and turning them into soil. The DDT was concentrated in their bodies, and earthworms are a major part of the robin diet. Therefore many robins that later appeared on campus fed on lethal doses of DDT through the earthworms. Those that did not consume a lethal dose were rendered sterile by the poison anyway, and only one baby robin was found on campus, as opposed to the 370 found in previous years. Yet this is only one sad example; "Heavy mortality has occurred among about 90 species of birds, including those most familiar to suburbanites and amateur naturalists. The populations of nesting birds in general have declined as much as 90 per cent in some of the sprayed towns" (Carson 109).Humans that consume or interact with animals and plants with such poisons

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