The Moral Structure In Rachel Carson's Silent Spring

If Rachel Carson’s silent Spring were to be described in a single word, meticulous might be the best choice. She leaves very few stones unturned. Her research is painstakingly thorough. Silent Spring does not, however, read like a manual of potential chemical interactions. No, despite Carson’s exhaustive explanations of chemical pesticides and their effects on every imaginable part of the ecosystem, Silent Spring reads like novel, if perhaps, a cautionary one. This is readability is due, at least in part, to her deft and precise use of structure.
Carson does more than master the spiral structure in Silent Spring. More direct, more pointed, than a traditional spiral, Carson develops what is, essentially, a bulls-eye structure. The human race in

Carson’s bullseye structure works here too by not telling directly how humans are impacted directly. For example, in “Surface Waters and Underground Seas,” Carson details the ways in which DDD consistently proves fatal to any number of aquatic life in any number of ways, not the least of which is through the carnivore’s food chain. She describes this a “House that Jack Built” scenario in which each the species higher up the food chain not only absorb the negative effects of the chemicals, they sometimes absorb more of them. Carson doesn’t tell readers to think about the very sport fisherman who were initially bother by the gnats. She doesn’t ask the reader to image what happens when a fisherman east one of those top of the aquatic food chain fish themselves. But, we’re asking ourselves this question anyway, aren’t we? We are, after all, at the tippy-top of that increasingly toxic carnivorous food chain. This device is part of why the structure is more a bullseye that a traditions structure. The loop doesn’t always connect directly back to the centerpiece, humanity, but it circles it obviously and