Silent Spring by Rachel Carson Book Analysis Essay Example

Excerpt from Silent Spring (1962) by Rachel Carson exposes drastic artificial alternation of nature within recent centuries. Carson was a marine biologist and environmental conservationist in the United States. Silent Spring is her last book, published two year before her death in 1964. It discusses the effect of pesticides and man-made disasters, as in “all man’s assault upon the environment is the contamination of air, earth, rivers, and sea.”. Her main-focused offender was the chemicals we spray in the air, the earth, and water. It was the then popular DDT pesticide. But stopping using insecticide alone would not stop this ravage. There had to be changes to the human’s nature. The success of the book with the mainstream audience became  a wake-up call from that greedy and prideful nature of ours that kept on exploiting the nature that we were born to.

Human’s greed and pride turned against the earth that gave humans. The changes humans so far brought to nature have been nothing but “impetuous and heedless”. For the past few centuries, we have achieved growth at an unthinkable rate. We used to adapt to the environment to survive. However, technological advances and newly discovered science made things easier than ever. Now, we make nature work for us. We created efficient machines, like steam and electric running machines, to increase industrial activities. And to scale up, we required more resources and lands, which caused more deforestation, more emission, less natural habitats, and less green space. This iterated over and over and ultimately became the direct cause of climate change that people nowadays are jointly fighting against. But, our greed and arrogance are the only obstacles to getting there. To an extent, greed drove humanity to be as successful as we are today. Without the trait, it is hard to be inspired, discover, and improve ourselves. However, our arrogance needs to end. The pride of being a human, or any species overall, is to survive, thrive, and conquer. We conquered nature, “[tampered] with the atom”, and “brewed” synthetic creations “having no counterparts in nature”, as Carson wrote. We then only had ourselves to conquer. Thus, weapons of mass destruction were developed to make those among us submit to one another. The pinnacle of modern weapons, nuclear weapons, evaporated Japanese cities in seconds. And since then, thanks to the certain world-ending element of invoking nuclear weapons, it has become de facto in keeping the world peace. It is ridiculous how billions of years of conception and “hundreds of millions of years to produce the life that now inhabits the earth” could be undone with modern technology. If we were to look past our pride, none of these things would’ve been needed. As for our greed, we can only limit it to a certain point. Silent Spring was meant to expose it. When Carson published this, she was met with fierce criticisms from chemical companies and their affiliates. The proponents went as far to discredit and threaten legal action against the publisher and herself. The effects of pesticides on the environment is evident enough but the chemical companies did not care and they only wanted to make money out of people’s need to eliminate pests and make crops less attentive. Similarly, the tobacco industry is no different. They purposefully defended their product, cigarette, despite all of the health concerns for consumers because they wanted to make money. And the biggest offenders of climate change, oil companies, were no at all different, they wanted to make money (this time by delaying changes and lobbying government). Silent Spring shone through the deceits and harms that big corporations promoted and held ourselves accountable for what we have done to ourselves and nature.

Humanity has evolved a lot, along with the technology we invented, but our greed and pride never stopped settling. Rachel Carson helped people to realize that with her work of Silent Spring. Sadly, corporations since then have not stopped growing bigger and more influential. The biggest companies in the world are either consumerist paradise or big oil companies. Still, as individuals, we can do something as simple as being comfortable with everything we have. Personally, I just use Linux and my life has vastly improved because I know for sure I will never get over my own problems and never grow tempting toward new things.