Rachel Carson's Silent Spring

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Research Paper: Silent Spring

Rachel Carson, born during the industrial boom in a small town called Springdale. There, a glue factory very near to her home exposed Carson, at a young age, to some of the effects chemicals can have on a small town. As Carson grew so did her ambitions to learn more about the environment. This determination won her a scholarship to Pennsylvania College for Women and later she furthered her education at Johns Hopkins University, studying Marine Biology. She was a woman always supportive to her family, so when financial trouble hit home, Carson left school to aid. She ended up writing her first book Under the Sea-Wind in 1941, which put financial issues at bay and left her with the ability to continue her studies, (Griswold). In the 1950`s Carson began to research the use of pesticides and their effects on the food chain and environment, leading to her most influential book being published in 1962. Silent Spring written by Rachel Carson changed the course of history because it informed the general public about what harms humans can do to the environment of our world and to the human race itself.

There are multiple points in Silent Spring that make the book so noteworthy in the history of environmentalism. The first being that Carson shows how the common person isn’t extremely informed about the pesticides that are being used every day all over their fields, homes and towns. Also they know nothing about how irreversible most of the damage is. Carson points out, “The most alarming of all mans assaults upon the environment is the contamination of air, earth, rivers, and sea with dangerous and even lethal materials. This pollution is for the most part irrecoverable; the chain of evil it initiates not onl...

... middle of paper ...

...and ignited a social movement to save the environment, along with the living creatures that inhabit it.

Works Cited

Carson, Rachel. Silent Spring. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2002. Print.

Griswold, Eliza. "How ‘Silent Spring’ Ignited the Environmental Movement." The New York Times. The New York Times, 22 Sept. 2012. Web. 04 Apr. 2014. .

McKibben, Bill. The End of Nature. New York: Random House, 1989. Print.

Musil, Bob. "Rachel Carson's Legacy." The Huffington Post. TheHuffingtonPost.com, 29 Mar. 2014. Web. 04 Apr. 2014. .

"Rachel Carson Biography." Bio.com. A&E Networks Television, n.d. Web. 04 Apr. 2014. .

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