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Excerpts From Silent Spring

1. Rachel Carson discusses how man has acquired significant power to alter the environment in the past century through contamination of air, water, and soil with dangerous and often lethal materials from industrial pollution and pesticides. These pollutants are largely irreversible and have unforeseen consequences up the food chain. 2. She notes that it took hundreds of millions of years for life to evolve and reach an adjustment and balance with its surroundings, with time for adaptation, but modern industrial chemicals and pesticides are created too quickly for nature to adapt, with around 500 new untested chemicals introduced each year. 3. Carson argues that widespread application of nonselective pesticides like DDT risks making the earth unfit for all life

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92 views

Excerpts From Silent Spring

1. Rachel Carson discusses how man has acquired significant power to alter the environment in the past century through contamination of air, water, and soil with dangerous and often lethal materials from industrial pollution and pesticides. These pollutants are largely irreversible and have unforeseen consequences up the food chain. 2. She notes that it took hundreds of millions of years for life to evolve and reach an adjustment and balance with its surroundings, with time for adaptation, but modern industrial chemicals and pesticides are created too quickly for nature to adapt, with around 500 new untested chemicals introduced each year. 3. Carson argues that widespread application of nonselective pesticides like DDT risks making the earth unfit for all life

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16gami
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© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Excerpts from Silent Spring (1962)1


Rachel Carson
The history of life on earth has been a history of interaction between living things and their
surroundings. To a large extent, the physical form and the habits of the earth's vegetation and its
animal life have been molded by the environment. Considering the whole span of earthly time, the
opposite effect, in which life actually modifies its surroundings, has been relatively slight. Only
within the moment of time represented by the present century has one speciesmanacquired
significant power to alter the nature of his world.
During the past quarter century this power has not only increased to one of disturbing
magnitude but it has changed in character. 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 worldthe very nature of its life.
Strontium 90, released through nuclear explosions into the air, comes to the earth in rain or drifts
down as fallout, lodges in soil, enters into the grass or corn or wheat grown there, and in time
takes up its abode in the bones of a human being, there to remain until his death. Similarly,
chemicals sprayed on croplands or forests or gardens lie long in the soil, entering into living
organisms, passing from one to another in a chain of poisoning and death. Or they pass
mysteriously by underground streams until they emerge and, through the alchemy of air and
sunlight, combine into new forms that kill vegetation, sicken cattle, and work unknown harm on
those who drink from once pure wells. As Albert Schweitzer has said, "Man can hardly even
recognize the devils of his own creation."
It took hundreds of millions of years to produce the life that now inhabits the eartheons
of time in which that developing and evolving and diversifying life reached a state of adjustment
and balance with its surroundings. The environment, rigorously shaping and directing the life it
supported, contained elements that were hostile as well as supporting. Certain rocks gave out
dangerous radiation, even within the light of the sun, from which all life draws its energy, there
were short-wave radiations with power to injure. Given timetime not in years but in millennia
life adjusts, and a balance has been reached. For time is the essential ingredient; but in the modern
world there is no time.
The rapidity of change and the speed with which new situations are created follow the
impetuous and heedless pace of man rather than the deliberate pace of nature. Radiation is no
longer merely the background radiation of rocks, the bombardment of cosmic rays, the ultraviolet
of the sun that have existed before there was any life on earth; radiation is now the unnatural
creation of man's tampering with the atom. The chemicals to which life is asked to make its
adjustment are no longer merely the calcium and silica and copper and all the rest of the minerals
washed out of the rocks and carried in rivers to the sea; they are the synthetic creations of man's
inventive mind, brewed in his laboratories, and having no counterparts in nature.
1

Rachel Carson, "Silent Spring," in Diane Ravitch, ed., The American Reader: Words that Moved a Nation (New
York: HarperCollins, 1990), 323-325.

To adjust to these chemicals would require time on the scale that is nature's; it would
require not merely the years of a man's life but the life of generations. And even this, were it by
some miracle possible, would be futile, for the new chemicals come from our laboratories in an
endless stream; almost five hundred annually find their way into actual use in the United States
alone. The figure is staggering and its implications are not easily grasped500 new chemicals to
which the bodies of men and animals are required somehow to adapt each year, chemicals totally
outside the limits of biologic experience.
Among them are many that are used in man's war against nature. Since the mid-1940's
over 200 basic chemicals have been created for use in killing insects, weeds, rodents, and other
organisms described in the modern vernacular as "pests"; and they are sold under several thousand
different brand names.
These sprays, dusts, and aerosols are now applied almost universally to farms, gardens,
forests, and homesnonselective chemicals that have the power to kill every insect, the "good"
and the "bad," to still the song of birds and the leaping of fish in the streams, to coat the leaves
with a deadly film, and to linger on in the soilall this though the intended target may be only a
few weeds or insects. Can anyone believe it is possible to lay down such a barrage of poisons on
the surface of the earth without making it unfit for all life? They should not be called
"insecticides," but "biocides."
The whole process of spraying seems caught up in an endless spiral. Since DDT was
released for civilian use, a process of escalation has been going on in which ever more toxic
materials must be found. This has happened because insects, in a triumphant vindication of
Darwin's principle of the survival of the fittest, have evolved super races immune to the particular
insecticide used, hence a deadlier one has always to be developedand then a deadlier one than
that....
The "control of nature" is a phrase conceived in arrogance, born of the Neanderthal age of
biology and philosophy, when it was supposed that nature exists for the convenience of man. The
concepts and practices of applied entomology for the most part date from that Stone Age of
science. It is our alarming misfortune that so primitive a science has armed itself with the most
modern and terrible weapons, and that in turning them against the insects it has also turned them
against the earth.

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