I have a personal rule when reading books. If I am not completely absorbed into it within fifty pages I put it down. This rule doesn’t work well for assigned reading, and fifty pages into Silent Spring I was so bored I was spending more time thinking of ways to avoid reading the book than actually reading it. Finally it occurred to me the reasons why I felt this boredom. After all, the book is not boring, Carson writes with a feverish passion towards defending nature that simply following her choice of verbs is intriguing. Anything relative to wildlife and plants are written with a frilly dreamlike flow of words, as if she is trying to conjure up a still image from a Disney animation. The moment man and pesticides are brought into context all flow ends and she writes in stark single word descriptions. It very effectively shows what side she is defending. This is when I realized what I was missing, which was causing my boredom. This is a very old book. Approaching this book to learn the obvious intentions was not a wise path for me. I needed to look at this book as a piece of history, a landmark to understand why we are where we are in our agricultural systems. Silent Spring was a success, and because all the various evidence that she uses in her book are examples I was strongly familiar with, solidly shows what type of impact her argument made.
I found the book to be very narrow minded. It was truly a cry, every page being a diatribe of complaints, never offering solid solutions. Yet, she consistently used that approach throughout the book making the reader create a deep sorrow for her, maybe even pity towards what she felt was being lost. If she were to offer two sides, or a bigger picture, she would not have come across so in need and injured. Less people would wanted to help in her quest for change. So, she kept this consistency by forming her arguments with great vagueness and working on the fears already established by people. She vaguely shares that the DDT founder won a Nobel Prize, but never that DDT was awarded that prize for saving lives in the World War I, in the area of medicine. She takes arsenic, a toxic element, and describes how it is found in increased amounts in our soil, leading to increased content in tobacco. She knows the association that people have with arsenic being a poison, but is it not also an essential element to man and plants? And where were the epidemic proportions of deaths associated with this increase? She has no need to answer these questions. Throughout the first third of the book she successfully chooses examples that the reader is already afraid of and lures them in from this to increase her credibility. I don’t condemn it I cheer her for it. This is the type of extremism that when a person is subjected to it they can simply put the book down if they don’t like it. Today, we are all very fortunate that people did not put down the book.
Throughout the rest of the book I shook my head, thinking of all her over the top accusations toward increased pesticide use, but no mention of modes of action. The academic standpoint she has as a biologist, yet she has never attempted to empathize with the American farmer. The way that she never references what was happening historically in our nation at that time that was putting the demand upon farmers for feeding more people. That was the era of baby boomer, no?
I thank her for her voice and how it has brought about a stronger focus on responsible agricultural practices. However, I hope that others that read this book recognize it’s age, and use the examples she documents as milestones to measure how far away from that type of system we have come. Her crying and negativity don’t solve problems. She has attacked the practices, and people responded. Today the majority of the insecticides she references are already removed or nearly removed from use today. We no longer need her narrow approach and acknowledging the date of print of her message is vital for people that are moved by it to see it as the birth of a crusade, but not the bible.