Take a photo of a barcode or cover
A review by cocoonofbooks
Silent Spring by Rachel Carson
4.0
Because this book is over 50 years old, reading it is a different experience than reading most nonfiction today that's aimed at raising awareness about modern-day situations. I knew that Carson's work had had an impact (though how many of her warnings are still relevant today, I'm scared to find out) and seeing exactly how she did that was the interesting part to me.
What struck me in the early chapters was just how much Carson sounded like today's conspiracy theorists and pseudo-science peddlers, like the people who believe vaccines cause autism. She would take one example of an incident with pesticides or one testimony from an expert and then ask rhetorical questions that implied the most dire, far-reaching consequences. She used a lot of correlation-as-causation arguments (e.g., cancer has increased and so has the use of pesticides so clearly pesticides cause cancer.) Of course, in later chapters she goes into far more detail, building a mountain of evidence for the danger of chemical pesticides that it's not necessary to add speculation on top of it (though she still does). It made me wonder if she would have been as successful if she'd simply presented the comprehensive list of evidence and left out the breathless doom-saying — was it that tone that got public opinion on her side? Would today's advocates for slowing climate change be more successful if they borrowed tactics from the other side and implied that there was a vast governmental conspiracy to prevent anything from being done about climate change? These are the things I was thinking throughout this book.
In the end, though, Carson really does make an irrefutable case about the dangers of mass applications of chemical pesticides. She addresses the problem from every possible angle: The effect that the indiscriminate application of poisons has on animals and humans who are not the primary targets. The ways that "safe" limits ignore the basic facts of nature's food cycle, so that the largest organisms end up ingesting the most poison. The reason there is far more research being done to create new insecticides than to study their effects. And finally, most damning of all, the vast evidence that many pesticides actually make the problem worse, killing off the target insect's natural predators while creating resistance in the insect population.
Although DDT and similar chemicals were banned in the wake of this book, and a whole environmental movement was spawned that included the creation of the EPA, I am not naïve enough to think that we do not still have problems today with environmental pollution driven by capitalism. Carson died two years after she finished this book — would she be glad about the changes her book wrought, or horrified by the new ways we've found to destroy our planet and ourselves?
What struck me in the early chapters was just how much Carson sounded like today's conspiracy theorists and pseudo-science peddlers, like the people who believe vaccines cause autism. She would take one example of an incident with pesticides or one testimony from an expert and then ask rhetorical questions that implied the most dire, far-reaching consequences. She used a lot of correlation-as-causation arguments (e.g., cancer has increased and so has the use of pesticides so clearly pesticides cause cancer.) Of course, in later chapters she goes into far more detail, building a mountain of evidence for the danger of chemical pesticides that it's not necessary to add speculation on top of it (though she still does). It made me wonder if she would have been as successful if she'd simply presented the comprehensive list of evidence and left out the breathless doom-saying — was it that tone that got public opinion on her side? Would today's advocates for slowing climate change be more successful if they borrowed tactics from the other side and implied that there was a vast governmental conspiracy to prevent anything from being done about climate change? These are the things I was thinking throughout this book.
In the end, though, Carson really does make an irrefutable case about the dangers of mass applications of chemical pesticides. She addresses the problem from every possible angle: The effect that the indiscriminate application of poisons has on animals and humans who are not the primary targets. The ways that "safe" limits ignore the basic facts of nature's food cycle, so that the largest organisms end up ingesting the most poison. The reason there is far more research being done to create new insecticides than to study their effects. And finally, most damning of all, the vast evidence that many pesticides actually make the problem worse, killing off the target insect's natural predators while creating resistance in the insect population.
Although DDT and similar chemicals were banned in the wake of this book, and a whole environmental movement was spawned that included the creation of the EPA, I am not naïve enough to think that we do not still have problems today with environmental pollution driven by capitalism. Carson died two years after she finished this book — would she be glad about the changes her book wrought, or horrified by the new ways we've found to destroy our planet and ourselves?