Silent Spring by Rachel Carson

By Liana Ockenhouse

Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring

Core Text

Carson, Rachel. Silent Spring. Penguin Books, in association with Hamish Hamilton, 2015.

Silent Spring by Carson, Rachel: Very Good Soft cover ...

Summary

Rachel Carson was a marine biologist who wrote the environmental science book Silent Spring. The story begins with Carson establishing the narrative of a fictional small town located in the heartland of America. All things considered, the town sounds perfect in every way, with animals and town folks living in harmony and a thriving community. However, suddenly in this short introduction, an unnamed, mysterious plague falls onto this small town and decimates the local wildlife, and causes the nameless town’s community and economy to collapse. This introduction for Silent Spring serves as a wake-up call for the rest of Carson’s work, where she begins to go into detailed, scientific reviews on environmental concerns. Carson discusses a wide range of topics concerning environmental issues, stemming from the devastation on birds to the dwindling of our sources of water, and Carson uses her education as a marine biologist to talk about the damages that humans have brought upon the environment and the animals. Many of the chapters’ focus is on chemicals such as insecticides and how they affect the ecosystem but Carson also speaks about general waste products and trash thrown out by people that are also harming the environment. Carson covers all ecosystems, specifies how each is suffering and does not hold back on explaining how severe the damage is, and going into the science of why it is all so devastating.

Literary Analysis:

Setting: In the first chapter of Silent Night, “A Fable For Tomorrow”, the setting is at a nameless town located in the American heartland. Carson describes this as a seemingly perfect town that has a thriving community and is in harmony with the nature and woodlands around it.

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Narration: In “A Fable For Tomorrow”, the fictional introduction to Carson’s work, the narration is in an omniscient third-person point of view. The narrator describes the town, goes into detail about its situation, and has full knowledge of the characters and their situations while holding no bias towards or from them.

Conflict: The conflict of the introduction story falls under the Human vs. Nature category. The nameless town, obviously populated by humans, has a thriving community that has farming and has a booming tourist attraction in the form of its surrounding nature. When Carson’s “strange blight” strikes the area, the farm animals and the humans’ health take a severe decline and the surrounding woodlands and streams are contaminated and wither away as well.

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Symbolism: The nameless town itself serves as something symbolic. This town Carson has crafted is meant to symbolize the current state of affairs in the world finds itself in regards to the environmental situations of the time. These environmental afflictions are symbolized by the nameless blight that sweeps over the entire town at the beginning of the book.

Resources:

Mishra, Sandip Kumar. “(Pdf) Ecocriticism: A Study of Environmental Issues in Literature.” ResearchGate, Unknown, 11 Nov. 2016, www.researchgate.net/publication/318350741_Ecocriticism_A_Study_of_Environmental_Issues_in_Literature.

Sandip Kumar Mishra, a PhD scholar in English who has studied at multiple universities including Harvard University, gives a general overview of the literature that focuses on environmental issues. In this particular paper, Mishra speaks on how “The extensive misuse of natural resources has left us at the brink of ditch. The rainforests are cut down, the fossil fuel is fast decreasing, the cycle of season is at disorder, ecological disaster is frequent now round the globe and our environment is at margin.” (Mishra). Mishra also talks about the genre of Ecocriticism and that it has an intentionally broad approach to its own subject matter and that sciences of all kinds contribute to the growth of the field. Even though Mishra’s article covers the specifics of environmental literature and the movements that have birthed it, his article provides ideal context on Carson’s work as well, not just Silent Spring but all of her environmental journals as well as others. Knowing the history of this field of literacy and its structure helps give information on Carson and why she publishes the work she put so much care and knowledge into.

Lear, Linda J. “Rachel Carson’s ‘Silent Spring.’” <i>Environmental History Review</i>, vol. 17, no. 2, 1993, pp. 23–48. <i>JSTOR</i>, www.jstor.org/stable/3984849. Accessed 6 Aug. 2021.

Linda J. Lear’s paper, published by the Oxford University Press, has a primary focus on Carson’s work, her accomplishments, and also the environmental history attached to her. The first pages of the paper is a biography of Carson’s early life, noting her reserved personality, her hometown of Springdale Pennsylvania, and even her husband, Robert Carson, and his career paths. Lear also speaks about Carson’s work outside of the Fish and Wildlife Service in Maine, such as her work on studying clouds for the “Omnibus” television series. Lear then goes into the making of Carson’s famous Silent Spring, noting how, as a young biologist, Carson had a mounting concern about the increasing use of synthetic pesticides. Lear describes that, because of Carson’s generation, that the scientist used her understanding of nuclear fallout and applied that knowledge to bring awareness to the scarily similar behavior of synthetic pesticides. Lear discusses how Carson used Silent Spring and her background in marine biology to become a public educator, speaking on the behave of conserving nature and the wildlife.

Cotton, Peter A. “Avian Migration Phenology and Global Climate Change.” PNAS, National Academy of Sciences, 14 Oct. 2003, www.pnas.org/content/100/21/12219.

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Peter A. Cotton from the School of Biological Sciences at the University of Plymouth gathered data on migratory birds and how climate change has affected them, specifically how it has prolonged the migrating seasons and altered their breeding and migration, among other issues. In Cotton’s study, there are three species of birds who had considerably weak data in concern of arriving at their breeding grounds on time. The birds in the study are the whinchat, lesser whitethroat, and yellow wagtail. The study could not determine a precise reason as to why these species of birds did not make it to their breeding grounds at an appropriate time. This article serves as a good parallel with Rachel Carson’s eighth chapter in Silent Spring where she discusses the decline in songbirds due to the spreading of DDT spray. Both articles take note of the steep decline of birds in their respective habitats and/or migratory paths.

Questions:

1. How does Rachel Carson go about applying her background as a marine biologist to the text of Silent Spring? What are types of human products affecting the environment does she cover throughout the book?

2. In the introduction, Carson provides a very clear image of what kind of damage can be caused by the environmental issues of her time. Are these issues still relevant today or have these problems been handled properly?

3. Carson describes the devastating effects insecticide has on plants and animals throughout her text. How did the insecticide in chapter ten contaminated farmlands and how did the government spread it in the first place?

#insecticide #climatechange #avian #environmentalissues #smalltown