Silent Spring

Silent Spring by Rachel Carson is one of those books you always hear about, but never read. I knew it was groundbreaking and important... it had to be to show up so many times in my science textbooks and I never took the time to read it, because I totally knew what it was all about. Like water quality and stuff. Turns out, I never quite knew what Silent Spring was about... until I read it.

For some reason, I always thought the title referred to a spring of water, and it was silent in the "silent but deadly" way because the water was secretly poisoned. Um, you probably already knew this... but "silent spring" refers to the season of the year and its silence... because the insecticides have killed off all the wild life. I'm glad to have gotten that all cleared up.

Alright, so Silent Spring was/is an amazing look at how arrogant humans are in their dealing with nature. How humans have disrupted the natural workings of the ecosystem in an attempt to manipulate a system that has developed over millions of years. How humans most often attempt the "easy fix" of using harsh chemicals to fix an otherwise minor nuisance. More than once I wanted to bang my head against the wall and shake the shoulders of the decision makers of the 1950s and '60s. In some communities, dead wildlife and pets covered the land in the days after spraying... but some other culprit was to blame. Seriously?

This passage on sheep (taken from the Natural History Survey) really got to me, not to mention the robins.

The sheep were lead to graze in a pasture across the road with one that had been treated with dieldrin.

"They lost interest in food and displayed extreme restlessness, following the pasture fence around and around apparently searching for a way out... [They] refused to be driven, bleated almost continously, and stood with their heads lowered; they were finally carried from the pasture... They displayed great desire for water. Two of the sheep were found dead in the stream passing through the pasture, and the remaining sheep were repeatedly driven out of the stream several having to be dragged forcibly from the water."

All that... and they were only NEXT TO a treated pasture. Shocking proof that chemicals cannot be contained and have a larger impact than calculated.

Recommendation: Naturally on the list of any environmentalist. I would have liked to read the anniversary edition, because I suspect it might mention the fallout of Silent Spring's publication over the years.

[I can't turn off the italics, it's driving me crazy!]