![]() "In Silent Spring, Rachel Carson exposes these experts to public scrutiny and makes it clear that at best they had not done their homework and at worst they had withheld the truth."įrom this perspective, the book is not just an ecological alarm call. "Science and technology and those who worked in these fields were revered as the saviours of the free world and the trustees of prosperity," says another biographer, Linda Lear. Even legitimate criticism of government policy was a risky act in the US then. She had decided to write "a book calling into question the paradigm of scientific progress that defined postwar American culture," says her biographer Mark Hamilton Lytle. Carson was trying to do more than end an iniquitous practice. Her remorseless approach was deliberate, however. Were she not such a gifted writer, the effect could have been soporific. There are the links between pesticides and genetic damage in humans. There are the cases of aerial spraying of DDT – to eliminate gypsy moths and fire ants – which wiped out blackbirds and meadowlarks. There is the slaughter at Clear Lake, California, of grebes and gulls, poisoned by a pesticide used merely to eradicate a harmless gnat. In particular, Carson's relentless style is striking and unexpected, filled as it is with tales of pesticide misuse that often show little variation in tone or detail. Literary fashions have changed, of course, though other, intriguing factors give Silent Spring a strange resonance to modern ears. "By current standards of science writing, it is awkward stuff." "It is dense and technical and not a book for the beach," says ornithologist Conor Mark Jameson, author of Silent Spring Revisited, a re-examination of Carson's legacy. Yet her most famous work, Silent Spring, is surprisingly difficult to get through. In 1952, she won a US National Book award for The Sea Around Us. She was a brilliant marine biologist and a superb writer whose prose was exquisite in its precision and lyricism. Rachel Carson possessed a rare combination of gifts. But is the environment in better shape today? Have we saved the planet? Or is it in greater peril than ever? Fifty years after Silent Spring was published, as the world warms, sea levels rise and coral reefs crumble, these questions have acquired a new and urgent relevance. We have much to thank Carson for: a powerful green movement, an awareness that we cannot punish our wildlife indiscriminately and an understanding of the fragility of nature's food chain. "Rachel Carson was the first to give voice to that concern in way that came through loud and clear to society." Or as Doris Lessing put it: "Carson was the originator of ecological concerns." "In the 60s, we were only just waking up to the power that we had to damage the natural world," says Jonathon Porritt, a former director of Friends of the Earth. Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace trace their origins directly to Silent Spring. It remains one of the most effective denunciations of industrial malpractice ever written and is widely credited with triggering popular ecological awareness in the US and Europe. Serialised in the New Yorker during the summer of 1962, Silent Spring was published that September. One or two authors had previously suggested modern pesticides posed dangers. ![]() "Sprays, dusts and aerosols are now applied almost universally to farms, gardens, forests and homes – non-selective chemicals that have the power to kill every insect, the 'good' and the 'bad', to still the song of the birds and the leaping of fish in the streams, to coat the leaves with a deadly film and to linger on in the soil – all this though the intended target may be only a few weeds or insects," she wrote. Powerful synthetic insecticides such as DDT were poisoning food chains, from insects upwards. It would provide an unequivocal identification of the bird killers. ![]() ![]() For most of 1961, she had locked herself in her cottage in Colesville, Maryland, to complete her book, Silent Spring. Several causes were proposed – poisons, viruses or other disease agents – but no one had a definitive answer or seemed sure of the cause – with one exception: the biologist Rachel Carson. Something was happening to the birds of the western world. Ornithologists also noted eggs were often not being laid while many that were laid did not hatch. For years, reports in the US indicated that numbers of birds, including America's national bird, the bald eagle, were dropping alarmingly. ![]()
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