Lesson 11 – Silent Spring
Part Two
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Lesson 11 – Silent Spring
Background Information
I.
Author
II. Silent Spring
III.Pesticide
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Lesson 11 – Silent Spring
I.
Author
Rachel Carson (1907—
1964) was an American
biologist and writer. She
was a quiet, private person,
fascinated with the
workings of nature from a
scientific and aesthetic
point of view.
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Lesson 11 – Silent Spring
I.
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Author
grew up on a small Pennsylvania farm, went
to the Pennsylvania College, majored in
zoology, and then went to John Hopkins for a
master’s degree in genetics.
published Under the Sea-Wind, then The Sea
Around Us and The Edge of the Sea, and
finally Silent Spring in 1962. In the wake of
Silent Spring, she was attacked personally
and as a scientist by many. While she was
working on Silent Spring, she was seriously
ill, a niece died and left a young son whom
she adopted, her mother died, and she
learned she had breast cancer.
died two years after Silent Spring was
published, at age 56.
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Lesson 11 – Silent Spring
I.
Author
Quotes from Rachel Carson
It is the public that is being asked to assume the
risks that the insect controllers calculate. The public
must decide whether it wishes to continue on the
present road, and it can do so only when in full
possession of the facts.
We still talk in terms of conquest. We still haven't
become mature enough to think of ourselves as only
a tiny part of a vast and incredible universe. Man's
attitude toward nature is today critically important
simply because we have now acquired a fateful
power to alter and destroy nature.
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Lesson 11 – Silent Spring
I.
Author
Quotes from Rachel Carson
But man is a part of nature, and his war against
nature is inevitably a war against himself. The
rains have become an instrument to bring down
from the atmosphere the deadly products of
atomic explosions. Water, which is probably our
most important natural resource, is now used and
re-used with incredible recklessness.
Now, I truly believe, that we in this generation,
must come to terms with nature, and I think
we’re challenged as mankind has never been
challenged before to prove our maturity and our
mastery, not of nature, but of ourselves.
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Lesson 11 – Silent Spring
I.
Author
Quotes from Rachel Carson
The more clearly we can focus our attention on
the wonders and realities of the universe about us,
the less taste we shall have for destruction.
Those who dwell, as scientists or laymen, among
the beauties of the earth are never alone or weary
in life… Those who contemplate the beauty of the
earth find reserves of strength that will endure as
long as life lasts.
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The end of Author.
Lesson 11 – Silent Spring
II. Silent Spring
received a letter from a friend
in the summer of 1957, saying
that an airplane hired by the
state spraying DDT to control
mosquitoes.
shocked by how extensive the
pesticide situation was; decided
to write about it and let people
know.
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Lesson 11 – Silent Spring
II.
Silent Spring
Summary of the book
The book starts with a fable of a lovely rural town
that suddenly suffers blight, sickness, and death.
Its people finally realize they had poisoned
themselves. She presented scientific evidence that
this was happening all over the country. She
explained in plain terms how the strongest bugs
survive, making stronger pesticides necessary, and
that DDT, though scarce in the water, becomes
concentrated as it works its way up the food chain.
She advocated integrated management: using a
minimum of chemicals combined with biological and
cultural controls.
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Lesson 11 – Silent Spring
II.
Silent Spring
Significance of the book
It roused a new public awareness that nature was
vulnerable to human intervention. She proposed that, at
times, technological progress is so fundamentally at
odds with natural processes that it must be curtailed.
Conservation had never raised much broad public
interest, for few people really worried about the
disappearance of wilderness. But the threats she had
outlined—the contamination of the food chain, cancer,
genetic damage, the deaths of entire species—were too
frightening to ignore. For the first time, the need to
regulate industry in order to protect the environment
became widely accepted, and environmentalism was
born.
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Lesson 11 – Silent Spring
II.
Silent Spring
Significance of the book
Thomas Paine's Common Sense galvanized radical
sentiment in the early days of the American
Revolution.
Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom's Cabin roused
Northern antipathy to slavery in the decade leading
up to the Civil War.
Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, which exposed the
hazards of the pesticide DDT, eloquently questioned
humanity's faith in technological progress and
helped set the stage for the environmental
movement.
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Lesson 11 – Silent Spring
II.
Silent Spring
The book that her efforts resulted in was about the
spraying and what it did to the birds and other
creatures. But that does not begin to describe its
scope or account for its impact. One might just as
well say that Darwin wrote about turtles and the
Pacific islands where they were found. (Esquire
magazine)
With the publication of Silent Spring in 1962, Rachel
Louise Carson, the essence of gentle scholarship, set
off a nationally publicized struggle between the
proponents and opponents of the widespread use of
poisonous chemicals to kill insects. Miss Carson was
an opponent. (The New York TIMES)
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The end of Silent Spring.
Lesson 11 – Silent Spring
III. Pesticide
DDT (invented in 1874) came into common
use around 1939, especially for insect control
for the army during World War II. Its inventor
was awarded the Nobel Prize.
DDT, the most powerful pesticide the world
had ever known, exposed nature’s
vulnerability. Unlike most pesticides, whose
effectiveness is limited to destroying one or
two types of insects, DDT was capable of
killing hundreds of different kinds at once.
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Lesson 11 – Silent Spring
III. Pesticide
• Developed in 1939, it first distinguished
itself during World War II, clearing South
Pacific islands of malaria-causing insects
for U.S. troops, while in Europe being
used as an effective delousing powder.
• When DDT became available for civilian
use in 1945, there were only a few people
who expressed second thoughts about
this new miracle compound.
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Lesson 11 – Silent Spring
III. Pesticide
•
President John F. Kennedy ordered the
President’s Science Advisory Committee to
examine the issues the book raised. As a
result, DDT came under much closer
government
supervision
and
was
eventually banned. The public debate
moved quickly from whether pesticides
were dangerous to which pesticides were
dangerous, and the burden of proof shifted
from the opponents of unrestrained
pesticide
use
to
the
chemicals’
manufacturers.
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The end of Pesticide.
Lesson 11 – Silent Spring
Part Two
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