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Book Review: “Carson, Rachel. Silent Spring. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2002”

This is a book review essay on “Carson, Rachel. Silent spring. Houghton Mifflin

Harcourt, 2002”. The book’s main thesis is that “we subject ourselves to slow poisoning by the

chemical pesticides’ abuse that pollutes the environment” (x). Therefore, Carson Rachel informs

the audience of the negative environmental impacts and human dangers triggered by the

chemical pesticides’ indiscriminate use.

Carson Rachel’s most important points are that the utmost disturbing of all “humans’

assault upon the environment is the sea, air, water bodies, and earth contamination with

hazardous and fatal materials” (Carson 4). As the author notes, “chemicals sprayed on croplands,

gardens or forests lie for a long period in soil, entering into living organisms, passing” from each

other in poisoning as well as mortality series (5). Apart from the fact that nuclear war can lead to

human extinction, the underlying issue of our age has become the pollution of humanity's

environment with such chemical elements of incredible possibilities for harm. Some as Carson

Rachel maintains would-be our imminent look designers toward a period whenever altering the

humankind germ plasm by design would be possible. However, we might easily be doing that by

negligence since numerous chemical substances such as radiation cause gene mutations.

According to the author, it is shocking to believe that people can “determine their future by

something so seemingly minor as an insect spray option” (Carson 7).

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The issues whose tried resolution has triggered such disasters in its wake are a

supplement to our contemporary lifestyle. Long prior to the man’s age, insects populated the

earth. Nevertheless, since man’s arrival, some insect species have conflicted with human well-

being as competitors for food supply and human sickness carriers (Carson 8). Sickness-carrying

insects become essential where humans are crowded together, more so under circumstances

where hygiene is poor, including during natural calamities or combat or in extreme deprivation

together with poverty conditions.

All human beings are subjected to interaction with unsafe chemical substances from birth

to death. According to the author, synthetic pesticides have been supplied across the inanimate

and animate universe in less than forty years of their utilization, occurring almost all over

(Carson 13). The synthetic pesticides have even been retrieved from the central water bodies and

groundwater watercourses flowing underground via the earth. Remains of these chemical

elements can take decades in soil. These chemicals also enter and lodge in the bodies of wild

animals, reptiles, fish, domestic animals, and birds to the extent that experts undertaking animal

tests find it challenging to discover subjects free from such poisoning (Carson 13). Scientists

have found these chemicals in “fish in remote mountain lakes, the man himself, earthworms

digging in the soil, and birds’ eggs” (Carson 13).

These chemical elements are kept within most man's bodies despite age. Such chemicals

also are found in the women’s milk and perhaps in the unborn children’s tissues. All this has

been due to the incredible invention and development of an industry for the manufacturing of

artificial chemical elements with insecticidal aspects. As Carson Rachel maintains, this industry

is a World War II child. In inventing chemical warfare agents, many chemicals developed in the

test center were perceived to be deadly to insects. According to Carson (14), the finding never
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came accidentally: insects were extensively employed to examine chemicals as death agents for

human beings. The outcome has been the infinite creation of synthetic pesticides. In being

artificial, these chemicals differ from the prewar periods’ simpler pesticides (Carson 14).

Moreover, the new synthetic pesticides have an enormous potency to poison and

penetrate the utmost essential body processes and alter them in lethal ways. For that reason,

insecticides extinguish the enzymes that play a pivotal part in protecting the body. They also

prevent the oxidation courses from which our bodies obtain energy and block the typical running

of numerous organs. Such insecticides can even introduce the slow and permanent

transformation into some cells, which triggers malignancy (Carson 14). Regardless of all these

adverse repercussions, humans continue to introduce new and lethal chemical elements yearly

and even to devised new uses enabling contact with these chemicals to become virtually global.

Carson, Rachel even argues that current pesticides are still lethal because many of them

lie amongst dual big chemical groups. One insecticide represented by

Dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane (DDT) is referred to as the "chlorinated hydrocarbons" (Carson

16). As the author notes, the other classification comprises the organic phosphorus pesticides,

besides being represented by parathion and the malathion.

Thus, the longing for a fast and easy way of destroying unwelcomed plants has produced

a huge and increasing collection of chemicals referred to as herbicides or weed killers (Carson

35). The myth that the weedkillers are deadly only to plants and are not a threat to animals has

been extensively circulated, a false legend. The herbicides comprise different breeds of chemical

elements, which act on animal tissues and vegetation. According to the author, weedkillers vary

sharply in their function on the organism. As Carson (35) argues, some herbicides are universal

toxins; others are powerful metabolism stimulants leading to a deadly intensification in body
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temperatures. Additionally, other weedkillers comprise malignant growths alone or in

collaboration with the rest of the chemical elements, while others strike at the race DNA by

triggering gene mutations. According to the author, the herbicides, like the pesticides, comprise

some lethal chemical elements, meaning that their inconsiderate use believing that they are not

harmful, might lead to disastrous outcomes (Carson 35).

Arsenic is among the recent insecticides related to cancer found in “sodium arsenate as

weed killers, as well as in calcium arsenate and other compounds as pesticides (Carson 221). The

link between arsenic and malignancy in animals together with humans is historic. As the author

argues, The Reichenstein’s town in Silesia had been, for decades, the mining site for silver ores,

arsenic ores, and gold (Carson 221). During that period, arsenic wastes filled the mine shafts’

area and were washed away by rivers originating from the highlands. As the authors observes,

“even the underground water became polluted, and arsenic entered the drinking water” (Carson

221). According to the author, for years, many of this vicinity’s populations suffered from “the

Reichenstein ailment”—chronic arsenicism with complementary syndromes of “the nervous

systems, liver, gastrointestinal and skin” (Carson 221). Malignant tumors, according to Carson

Rachel, were a prevalent condition accompaniment. The arsenic-soaked tobacco plantation soils

and numerous orchards within the Northwest contaminated water supplies in America.

Therefore, an arsenic-polluted environment negatively affects animals and human beings.

The paper has argued that, “Carson, Rachel. Silent Spring. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt,

2002” book’s main thesis is that we subject ourselves to slow poisoning by the chemical

pesticides’ abuse that pollutes the environment. As the author notes, the longing for a fast and

easy way of destroying unwelcomed plants has produced a huge and increasing collection of

chemicals referred to as herbicides or weed killers. Besides, apart from the fact that nuclear war
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can lead to human extinction, the underlying issue of our age has become the pollution of

humanity's environment with such chemical elements of incredible possibilities for harm. All

human beings are subjected to interaction with unsafe chemical substances from birth to death.

According to the author, synthetic pesticides have been supplied across the inanimate and

animate universe in less than forty years of their utilization, occurring almost all over.
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Work Cited

Carson, Rachel. Silent spring. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2002.