Silent
Spring
by
Rachel Carson
Sketches
from one of the Twentieth Century's most important works
A
Fable for Tomorrow
"There
was once a town in the heart of America where all life seemed
to live in harmony with its surroundings...a pastoral Eden of
hardwood forests and bountiful wildlife...strange blight crept
over the area and everything began to change...Everywhere was
a shadow of death...It was a spring without voices. On the mornings
that had once throbbed with the dawn chorus of robins, catbirds,
doves, jays, wrens, and scores of other bird voices there was
now no sound; only silence lay over the fields and woods and marsh...Even
the streams were now lifeless...No witchcraft, no enemy action
had silenced the rebirth of new life in this stricken world. The
people had done it themselves...
"Man,
however much he may like to pretend, is part of nature.
"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...The poisons circulate 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...They travel from link to link of the food chain...."
Exterminism: "Nonselective 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 soil...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
insects are winning: We're on a pesticide treadmill.
The insects adapt to the particular insecticide used...forcing
us to find ever deadlier new ones...Thus the chemical war is never
won, and all life is caught in its violent crossfire...many chemicals,
like radiation, bring about gene mutations...Many of these substances
are persistent and bio-accumulative. Health effects depend on
exposure over time. Effects are delayed. But this can lull us:
the danger is easily ignored. It
is human nature to shrug off what may seem to us a vague threat
of future disaster...Some of these substances have toxic effects in very small quantities.
In the ecology of our bodies, minute causes produce mighty effects."
Violation
of human rights: "We have subjected
enormous numbers of people to contact with these poisons, without
their consent and often without their knowledge...
Self-endangerment: "The chief public health threat has ceased to be disease;
now it is a hazard we ourselves have introduced into our world.
Indeed, we may be technically incapable of detecting the presence
of some toxins...The lack of sufficiently delicate methods to detect
injury before symptoms appear is one of the great unsolved problems
in medicine."
We
are the subjects of a massive uncontrolled experiment:
"A human being, unlike a laboratory animal living under rigidly
controlled conditions, is never exposed to one chemical alone...we
are subject to multiple exposures...This is a problem of ecology,
of interrelationships, of interdependence."
Why
have we done this? Carson dismisses
the claim that increased farm production necessitates this; as far
as that goes overproduction is the real problem. Rather, the source
lies in our "modern way of life," specifically: (1) agricultural
intensification and its use of large scale monoculture (simplification
destroys nature's "checks and balances"); and (2) the migration
of species with humans, both deliberately and accidentally ("nearly
half of the 180 or so major insect enemies of plants in the United
States are accidental imports from abroad").
The
alternative: develop ecological knowledge and use it. "We need the basic knowledge of animal populations and their relations
to their surroundings, but we allow the chemical death to fall as
though there were no alternative...Have we fallen into a mesmerized
state that makes us accept as inevitable that which is inferior
and detrimental?...The choice, after all, is ours to make."
If
once we have "at last asserted our 'right to know,'" we decide that
we "are being asked to take senseless and frightening risks," then
we should no longer accept the counsel of those who tell us that
we must fill our world with poisonous chemicals; we should look
about and see what other course is open to us.
But
have we done this? Absolutely not. According to the National
Coalition Against the Misuse of Pesticides, we produce pesticides
today at a rate thousand of times faster than we did when Silent Spring was published
35 years ago.
Read
Al Gore's Introduction to New Edition
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