Silent Spring

Rachel Carson’s DDT

What is DDT? DDT is a non-selective insecticide. It killed all insect pests good or bad. As Rachel Carson put it in Silent Spring it had the power to; ‘still the songs of birds and the leaping of fish in the streams, to coat the leaves with a deadly film and to linger on in ...

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Early History of DDT

During the time that Silent Spring was written and published DDT was one of the most widely used pesticides in the world. But the origins of DDT went back to the last quarter of the 19th century, when it was first synthesized by a German chemist in 1874. It wasn’t until just before the Second ...

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Nature is hitting back

By harming Nature we harm ourselves. We are one with our surroundings, what we do to it even through abject ignorance, will eventually come back to haunt us. Our internal environment is a reflection of our external world we are not separate from Nature. Rachel Carson made all this apparent in her 1962 book Silent Spring, ...

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Why Action Towards Control has been Slow

Silent Spring has made us aware, but change for the better has been slow. Unlike famines, epidemics and natural disasters that were the scourge of pre-industrial society, the dangers of chemical pollutants are of our own making. The frustratingly slow progress towards creating a synthetic toxic chemical free environment stems from our inability to determine ...

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New Chemical Dangers

But highly visible pollution events were occurring all over America during the same period. Devastating events that no-one could easily ignore. Rachel Carson was unique in that she compiled the most graphic of these events and eloquently described them in her book. Silent Spring opened with a ‘fable for tomorrow’ where she described a fictional ...

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The Importance Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring

The modern environmental movement was established with the release of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring in 1962. It was an important work of literature that opened the eyes of the World to the dangers of toxic chemical pollutants in the environment. In her book, Rachel Carson cleverly integrated the concerns of urban and industrial reformers with ...

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Silent Spring and Chemical Pollutants

During the 1950’s the U.S embarked on campaigns to control various aspects of the natural world. Ambitious, I know, and some will claim an over-exaggeration but the facts speaks for themselves. During this period there was more than a five-fold increase of production of synthetic pesticides with more than 650 million pounds of pesticides produced ...

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