Rachel Carson is a marine biologist
who wrote books and pamphlets on natural resources and conservation of the
environment. She has already written a series of books on the sea such as Under
the Sea-Wind, The Sea Around Us and The Edge of the Sea. However,
her Silent Spring published in 1962 was a turning point in environmental
studies because of its harsh criticism of the excessive use of pesticides in
farming.
She ushered in a significant change in
environmental studies with the publication of her Silent Spring. This
was published in serialised form in the New Yorker and later in the form of a
book. It is about the impact of industrialisation and urbanisation on the
environment .
The title highlights the silence that
come over nature as the dawn chorus of robins, catbirds, doves, jays, wrens,
and scores of other bird species have become extinct.The writer speaks of a
springtime world that has become completely silent and no birdsongs are heard
anywhere.
Carson pointed out that the reason for
this destruction of the environment in the United States was the uncontrolled
use of organic pesticides such as DDT, aldrin and dieldrin used to control pest
insects in agriculture. Though these compounds led to agricultural benefits,
they posed serious threats to animal and human life as Carson proves by giving
scientific evidence.
She gives several examples of how the
pesticides such as DDT, aldrin and dieldrin has managed to get into the human
food chain largely through aerial spraying. She speaks of the large-scale
contamination of the waterbodies in several places and the subsequent entry of
these compounds into human and animal bodies. She gives the example of an egg
that a child eats, which might contain traces of these compounds from the grain
that the mother hen ate for its food.
The harmful effects of these chemicals
on humans and animals ranged from genetic mutation to cancer. However, what she
predicted was the complete extinction of many bird species as a result of using
pesticides. Moreover, she was of the view that the pests of the future might be
resistant to these chemicals and might even result in species mutations.
This book was a clarion call for
greater awareness about the great destruction that human beings were causing to
the Earth and its natural cycles. Though there was much protest from the
chemical companies, Carson’s Silent Spring is a key text in
environmental studies because it led to the banning of DDT in the US and to a greater
awareness about the consequences of using deadly pesticides on the environment.
It gradually led to the development of an ecocentric attitude in the latter
half of the twentieth century.
