Silent Spring

Written by, Katelyn Dash

       For my book report I read Silent Spring by Rachel Carson. This book is to educate readers about the dangers of pesticides and alternatives that cost less, in money and the overall outcome of the environment, especially how pesticides affect humans and wildlife (by direct contact, or by eating something that has been sprayed with pesticides). The theme of this book is the various types of pesticides that were developed in the mid 1900’s and how dangerous they are to the environment.

Rachel Carson starts the education of her readers by first telling a background of the most poisonous and most widely chemicals used in pesticides in 1962, when this book was written. The main chemicals talked about in this book are DDT, aldrin, dieldrin and parathion. When talking about each of these chemicals Rachel Carson tells about their chemical structure, their potency (relative to each other and how deadly it is to wildlife and humans), the symptoms of someone dying from that particular poison and other facts (such as how long they take to leave the soil after sprayed).

      She then moves on and uses most of the book talking about how these chemicals are drastically affecting the environment, the ground water, wildlife populations, deaths and illnesses in humans, etc. Then near the end of the book she talks about ways to get rid of pests that doesn’t have drastic affect on the environment. (She talks about ways to use alternatives to pesticides throughout the book but more so at the end.)

An example of how drastically pesticides have affected the environment was a major destruction of salmon back in 1954. Along the Northwest Miramichi river in Canada the newly hatched and 1 to 2 year old salmon were swimming around the spawning grounds seeking out a variety of insect life. This life changed in June of that year because the spraying of DDT had started again. (This had started the year before to exterminate the budworm, which attacks several types of evergreens. The planes were spraying a solution of half a pound of DDT in an oil solution per acre.)

       Once the spraying was done no macro invertebrates remained on the stream bottoms to feed the fish. None of that years spawned salmon remained. One of every six salmon that were a year old was all that remained, and a third of the salmon about ready to go to sea were dead.

However, this is only one example of many events related to pesticide spraying that happened all over the US in the late 1940’s and all during the 1950’s. This book was a huge importance in conveying what the varieties of pesticides really were and the damage they caused. This book caused the government, who was denying that pesticides had caused problems, to realize the truth about pesticides and their effects, which the scientists had been talking about for years.

       This book is very strong all the way through with strong evidence supporting pesticides are dangerous for our environment. I support the theme of this book based on all of the information about how pesticides are affecting our environment.

       I think that this book would be a good read for some one about my age, even some one older. People should know how pesticides affect the environment when they spray them to kill pesticides. This book’s very informative about the cost of using pesticides, which you have to keep reapplying and don’t work on the pest you’re trying to get rid of. It tells the stories about how the varieties of pesticide chemicals are drastically altering our environment, by contaminating ground water, stream and rivers and the big death tolls in wildlife. How so many creatures have died that species are in danger of going extinct. If kids my age were to read this book they would be very informed about the cost of pesticides.

       Reading this book made me think about what is happening to our environment due to the extensive pesticide spraying. If others were to read this book they might realize that the spraying of pesticides is too great a cost and choose to use the alternative choices, such as planting marigolds to get rid of a worm that harms roses. By choosing these alternatives we could start fixing the environment instead of destroying it with pesticides.

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