BuzzFlash Reviews

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This is THE Book that launched the environmental movement. It's hard to think that Rachel Carson's tour-de-force is more than 40 years old. You can read this special 40th anniversary edition of "Silent Spring" and realize how much the Bush administration has turned back the clock.

Rachel Carson awakened us to the ruinous effects of a chemical/pesticide industry run amuck. Now, Bush is letting them run amuck again.

There is a direct line from Rachel Carson to Al Gore and an "Inconvenient Truth." The environmental movement owes much to her. She had courage to take on an entire industry at a time when others were -- well -- silent.

As a an Indiana University class website recalls:

"Even though she was labeled as hysterical and extremist by the chemical industry and certain members of the media, their attempts to discredit Miss Carson by challenging her credibility as a scientist backfired. The onslaught of attacks on Miss Carson by the chemical industry were viewed negatively by the public, because the industry was seen as attacking a sincere woman who was already regarded as an accomplished writer and scientist from the fame and recognition she received for her 1951 book, The Sea Around Us. Furthermore, Silent Spring was well documented with 55 pages of references and included a list of scientific experts that had reviewed her book (Lear 1997).

Another reason that Miss Carson was so effecive in generating pubic opposition to pesticide use was her ability to incorporate into her book real-world examples of how pesticides were negatively impacting the environment. For instance, in explaining how pesticides sometimes kill many other forms of life which are not targeted, she cites as an example the significant decline in young salmon populations that occurred in Northwest Miramichi after DDT spraying was performed in the area to protect the balsam forests from the spruce budworm. In addition to killing the spruce budworm, Miss Carson explains, that DDT also killed the aquatic insects which the young salmon depend on for food and therefore left nothing for the young salmon to eat.

In another example, she explains how DDT spraying was initiated during the mid 1950s to fight the spread of Dutch Elm disease that was destroying the elm trees on the campus of Michigan State University and indirectly killed a large number of robins that fed in the area. Although the spraying was aimed at eradicating the bark beetle which was spreading the disease, all parts of the trees were sprayed with the poison. Therefore, because the leaves of the trees were also coated with the insecticide, earthworms feeding on the leaves absorbed the poison and robins which later ate the contaminated worms died of DDT poisoning.

The examples that Miss Carson wrote about in Silent Spring helped to illustrate the interrelationship of living organisms. Her writings helped Americans to understand that humans were not separate from nature, but connected to the earth as part of an interconnected web of life (Brooks 1972). In writing about the above events, Miss Carson concludes:

For each of us, as for the robin in Michigan, or the salmon in the Miramichi, this is a problem of ecology, of interrelationships, of interdependence. We poison the caddis flies in the stream and the salmon runs dwindle and die. . . . We spray our elms and following springs are silent of robin song, not because we sprayed the robins directly but because the poison traveled, step by step, through the now familiar elmleaf -earthworm-robin cycle. These are matters of record, observable, part of the visible world around us. They reflect the web of life-or death-that scientists know as ecology."

Rachel Carson was a giant evolutionary step forward in understanding our interrelationship with our environment.

George W. Bush has moved us five steps backward.

If you haven't read "Silent Spring," it's time you do.



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