'Silent Spring' was published in 1962, and written by Rachel Carson. 'Silent Spring' is a groundbreaking book. The publication of the book 'Silent Spring' drew attention to the impact of chemicals on the natural environment. 'Silent Spring' was an early call to arms for the environmental movement. 'Silent Spring' was not any other fiction. In 'Silent Spring' Rachel Carson portrays the forces which assault nature and human life itself. Where had birds gone? The few birds seen anywhere trembled violently and could not fly. It was a silent spring without voices. Silent Spring galvanized conservationists, ecologists, biologists, reformers, and organic farmers to join in the American environmental movement.
Rachel Carson compiled 'Silent Spring' as one would a lawyer's brief, with no fewer than 55 pages of notes and a list of experts who had read and approved the manuscript. Many eminent scientists rose to her defense, and when President John F. Kennedy ordered the President's Science Advisory Committee to examine the issues the book raised, its report thoroughly vindicated both 'Silent Spring' and its author.
The Impact Of Books Like Silent Spring
How a woman took on the chemical industry and raised important questions on the impact of human action on nature. Books have been the most powerful influencer of social change in American life. Thomas Paine's Common Sense galvanized radical sentiment in the early days of the Revolution; Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe roused the North's antipathy to slavery in the decade leading up to the Civil War.
Rachel Carson's Silent Spring exposed the hazards of the pesticide DDT, eloquently questioned humanity's faith in technological progress and helped set the stage for the environmental movement. Rachel Carson held an ecological view of nature. DDT, the most powerful pesticide the world had ever known, exposed nature's vulnerability. Unlike most pesticides, whose effectiveness is limited to destroying one or two types of insects, DDT was capable of killing hundreds of different kinds at once.
Rachel Carson's books Under the Sea Wind, The Sea Around Us, and The Edge of the Sea were hymns to the interconnectedness of nature and all living things.
The Deep Ecology philosophy emphasizes the interdependent value of human and non-human life and the importance of the ecosystem. Silent Spring affected events abroad and prepared the way for the rise of environmental and Green movements worldwide.
Global climate change and the harmful genetically modified organisms are now the focus of environmental movements. 'Silent Spring' asks humankind to wake up and save nature because it may already be too late. The title 'Silent Spring' comes from an imaginary community in which there was a strange silence.
Silent Spring met with very fierce opposition by chemical companies. 'Silent Spring' had a message for those who cared about environment. Cornell University provides an overview of Sociology of Environment and hyperlinks to resources on the Web.
Walter Sullivan was only the first of many to compare Silent Spring to Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the most controversial American book of the nineteenth century. Silent Spring inspired immediate outrage and opposition.
Mornings once throbbed with the dawn chorus of robins, catbirds, doves, and scores of other bird voices, but now there was no sound. There is only silence over the fields and woods and marsh. Silent spring argues that uncontrolled and unexamined pesticide use harms and kills.
Silent spring documents the detrimental effects of pesticides on the environment. Silent spring gives a call to look at how the use of chemicals can cause damage and impact the world around us and demonstrates the fragility of the biodiversity on the planet.