Silent Spring

In this brilliant and controversial book, Miss Rachel Carson brings her training as a biologist and her skill as a writer to bear with great force on a significant and even sinister aspect of man’s technological progress. This is the story of the use of toxic chemicals in the countryside and of the widespread destruction of wildlife in America (caused by pesticides, fungicides and herbicides).

But Silent Spring is not merely about poisons; it is about ecology or the relation of plants and animals to their environment and to one another. Ecologists are more and more coming to recognize that for this purpose man is an animal and indeed the most important of all animals and that however artificial his dwelling, he cannot with impunity allow the natural environment of living things from which he has so recently emerged to be destroyed. Fundamentally, therefore, Miss Carson makes a well-reasoned and persuasive case for human beings to learn to appreciate the fact that they are part of the entire living world inhabiting this planet, and that they must understand its conditions of existence and so behave that these conditions are not violated.

Under primitive agricultural conditions the farmer had few insect problems. These arose with the intensification of agriculture – the devotion of immense acreages to a single crop. We are told that the enormous and expanding use of pesticides is necessary to maintain farm production. Yet is our real problem not one of over-production? – Marine Biologist, Author, and Conservationist