Silent Spring

by Rachel Carson

It was a spring without voices.

No witchcraft, no enemy action had silenced the rebirth of new life in this stricken world. The people had done it themselves.

Only within the moment of time represented by the present century has one species—man—acquired significant power to alter the nature of his world.

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.

As Albert Schweitzer has said, “Man can hardly even recognize the devils of his own creation.”

Given time— time not in years but in millennia—life adjusts, and a balance has been reached. For time is the essential ingredient; but in the modern world there is no time.

500 new chemicals to which the bodies of men and animals are required somehow to adapt each year, chemicals totally outside the limits of biologic experience.

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.”

in a triumphant vindication of Darwin’s principle of the survival of the fittest, have evolved super races immune to the particular insecticide used, hence a deadlier one has always to be developed—and then a deadlier one than that.

the chemical war is never won, and all life is caught in its violent crossfire.

It is ironic to think that man might determine his own future by something so seemingly trivial as the choice of an insect spray.

How could intelligent beings seek to control a few unwanted species by a method that contaminated the entire environment and brought the threat of disease and death even to their own kind?

All this is not to say there is no insect problem and no need of control. I am saying, rather, that control must be geared to realities, not to mythical situations, and that the methods employed must be such that they do not destroy us along with the insects.

Nature has introduced great variety into the landscape, but man has displayed a passion for simplifying it.

In the words of Jean Rostand, “The obligation to endure gives us the right to know.”

It is a bird of spectacular appearance and beguiling habits, building its floating nests in shallow lakes of western United States and Canada. It is called the “swan grebe” with reason, for it glides with scarcely a ripple across the lake surface, the body riding low, white neck and shining black head held high.

It was a house-that-Jack-built sequence, in which the large carnivores had eaten the smaller carnivores, that had eaten the herbivores, that had eaten the plankton, that had absorbed the poison from the water.

the poison had not really left the lake; it had merely gone into the fabric of the life the lake supports.

“Any science may be likened to a river,” says a Johns Hopkins biologist, Professor Carl P. Swanson. “It has its obscure and unpretentious beginning; its quiet stretches as well as its rapids; its periods of drought as well as of fullness. It gathers momentum with the work of many investigators and as it is fed by other streams of thought; it is deepened and broadened by the concepts and generalizations that are gradually evolved.”

malaria-carrying mosquitoes persist in his country in spite of insecticide treatment; the release of sterile males might then provide the final blow needed to eliminate this population.

Dr. Knipling has pointed out that effective chemical insect sterilization “might easily outdo some of the best of known insecticides.”

Repellant sounds may offer greater possibilities than attractants.

To some the term microbial insecticide may conjure up pictures of bacterial warfare that would endanger other forms of life. This is not true. In contrast to chemicals, insect pathogens are harmless to all but their intended targets. Dr. Edward Steinhaus, an outstanding authority on insect pathology, has stated emphatically that there is “no authenticated recorded instance of a true insect pathogen having caused an infectious disease in a vertebrate animal either experimentally or in nature.”

Dr. Heinz Ruppertshofen, a forestry officer in Mölln, Germany, who believes that a single introduced predator or parasite is less effective than an array of the “natural companions” of the trees.

A single spider may destroy in her life of 18 months an average of 2000 insects. A biologically sound forest has 50 to 150 spiders to the square meter (a little more than a square yard).

The “control of nature” is a phrase conceived in arrogance, born of the Neanderthal age of biology and philosophy, when it was supposed that nature exists for the convenience of man. The concepts and practices of applied entomology for the most part date from that Stone Age of science. It is our alarming misfortune that so primitive a science has armed itself with the most modern and terrible weapons, and that in turning them against the insects it has also turned them against the earth.