Silent Spring

Scariest book I've ever read! (sorry Stephen King!) ( )

Great!! This is a classic of the environmental movement, and I’d recommend it to anybody interested in the topic. Carson is a bit repetitive at times, and her wording can be confusing, but for the most part she does a great job at describing the situation and reasons to pressure change in the way we interact with our environment. This book is written about the chemicals we put into the world, but the mindset it pushes can be extended far beyond that. ( )

I first read this in the l960s and remember well the furor around it. It helped me early on to see the dark stain in humanity. Yes, it was widely applauded, then we went back to business as usual painting ourselves in a corner. ( )

This book changed history. It convinced politicians and other government figures that we have to preserve nature while it’s still here.The book’s message is still as relevant today as it was in the twentieth century when it was written. Rachel Carson is a brilliant practical woman who wants to improve our world and take care of the wild life we were destroying with chemicals and deforestation. It is a very inspiring book and if you didn’t already think with an ecological mindset, you will after you read it.

This book also brushes over the topic of the aged lifestyle. Carson believes that we live in an over-mechanized time and that we should give the machines a break. I some-what agree with that statement. I think that we should make more eco-friendly machines and factories (although it's very expensive.) But in reality, what will be better in the long-term? The eco-friendly machines and factories are. I don’t think we should give up our advanced lifestyles, but we should be more conscientious about nature than we are. ( )

I learned a lot from this book, and although parts of it are dated, others are still very relevant for today.

One of the things I did not know was that the pesticides Rachel Carson was talking about actually killed birds outright. Up till now I had thought that the title referred to the eggshell thinning caused by DDT, which would cause a gradual decline in bird populations. But at the time this effect was not known; what was known was that pigeons would die in midflight and fall from the skies and songbirds would die in convulsions after the application of the pesticides, and so the "silent spring" would come much sooner.

Contrary to popular belief, Silent Spring did not call for a ban on either DDT or any other pesticide. Instead it called for the more thoughtful and more responsible use of pesticides. But the message the public received appears to have been almost the reverse: DDT et al have all been banned in the US, while other broad-spectrum insecticides and herbicides continue to be applied with much less thought (glyphosate, I’m looking at you).

This book was not just scaremongering; according to a 1999 report prepared by the National Pesticide Information Center DDT is a dangerous neurotoxin.

So I do think this book is still relevant today. And I would say that what is most disturbing now is that the ignorance of the harm pesticides were causing has been replaced with indifference. ( )