Silent Spring

Reviewed by: Jessie Bodell

For my book review, I chose to read Silent Spring by Rachel Carson. I hadn't heard of the author before so I didn't really know what to expect, but I was pleasantly surprised. The main theme of the book is how the spraying of pesticides effects all aspects of our ecosystem. She had the book broken up into different sections, each focusing on a specific thing or organism that is damaged by the careless distribution of chemicals on our earth.

The author used examples from specific places suffering from pest problems, spraying pesticides, and having the problem worsen due to resistance and pollution. She went into incredible detail, explaining the chemical properties of certain insecticides and how and why they made things worse instead of better. It really made me realize that we should use natural ways of destroying pests, like adding natural predators of a species to an area to eliminate them. This has proven effective for several areas, with minimum damage to the plants or trees around it.

Because the author elaborated so much on everything, using facts and logic, she convinced me. This book helped me see how the littlest change to the environment can effect every single living thing. For example: if we sprayed an elm tree with pesticides, when autumn came and the leaves fell off they would land on the ground. From there, they would start decomposing and become food for the worms. The robins would eat the worms, and through this food chain they would die from poisoning. This not only would hurt the animals and plants, it will ultimately hurt us as well. Runoff from a farmer's field could get into a river, poison the macro invertebrates, and then poison the fish who eat them. If humans eat the fish with pesticides stored in them, then we could die from that.

I think that this is a historically important book, because it opened so many people's eyes to the consequences of their actions. We can't just fly over forests, rivers, and lakes spraying pesticides and expect animals to be unaffected. This book not only tells us of these dangers, but it gives alternative solutions to them, also. Even though this book was released in 1962 and is quite old, I found that I could relate to many of the things she talked about. Especially because a lot of these things we have recently studied in biology class. She touches upon every single organism that is in danger because of these chemicals, and not one thing is overlooked. I think that this book made people more aware of exactly how they are changing things for the worse, and has definitely prevented a lot of deaths by doing so.

This book would change anyone's view of the world significantly. What scared me the most is that deadly chemicals are sold in grocery stores and without warning labels on them. The fact that anyone has access to such toxic chemicals is terrifying, and from a consumer standpoint I will definitely be more careful in the future if I ever have to buy anything like that myself. These big companies don't tell us how dangerous their products are, or that they should be applied with the utmost care. This book helped me see pesticides from a different standpoint which greatly influenced how I feel about them now.

The strong points of this book were definitely the use of facts and statistics. While reading it, I could tell that the author had spent a significant amount of time researching. Even though she spent a lot of time with these scientific and mathematic things, it didn't make the book boring. I liked that she referred to a Robert Frost poem in one chapter, and she had a whole section about salmon. I just enjoyed the book in general. It was informative and interesting at the same time.

A weak point of the book was how old it was. In many parts I was left wondering if the situations were the same now, at the present, than they had been some forty or fifty years ago. I'm sure that they have more regulations on pesticides now than they did at that time. Maybe they're even using the environmentally safe methods of pest controlling that the author mentioned. It was really strange to see such old dates, too, some going back to the 1800's. But, at the same time, it allowed me to better understand the history of pesticides and how they came about. It was just a bit annoying because I know things in the scientific world progress very quickly, so this left me wondering if all the things in this book were still accurate today.

I would recommend this book to anyone. It does have some very large words, mostly scientific ones, which I had trouble with. So, in order to get the most out of this book you should be a strong reader and have an already established knowledge of chemical compounds and and related things. Reading this book while taking biology was good, because it mentioned a lot of things that we had studied, or are currently studying.

“The most alarming of all man's assaults upon the environment is the contamination of air, earth, rivers, and sea with dangerous and even lethal materials. This pollution is for the most part irrecoverable; the chain of evil it initiates not only in the world that must support life but in living tissues is for the most part irreversible. In this now universal contamination of the environment, chemicals are the sinister and little-recognized partners of radiation in changing the very nature of the world- the very nature of its life.” (P. 16, ¶ 2)

This quote is located near the beginning of the book, and I thought it basically summarized the entire thing. At first it seemed like this could only be the theme for a short research paper, but as I kept reading I began to realize that there was so much more to this pollution than I had assumed. The fact that man thinks that he can douse acres upon acres of land with pesticides without any consequence is alarming. If we keep going at the pace we're at, there might be no way of recovering from the destruction sure to come.

Even though I chose this book at random, I'm really glad that I chose it. It concerns important things about our future, the future of our earth, and everyone should know what we're doing to destroy it. This book was written a while ago, but I know that there are still problems with pesticides and resistant insects today. This is a problem that involves all of us, we should all be aware of every one of the points this book raises. I'm sure that all of us want our wildlife and plants to thrive to their fullest. We don't want to wake up one morning to a silence devoid of bird song, and we can't afford to keep poisoning the earth. I'm glad that I now know now how to prevent this from happening.

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