Silent Spring

Excerpts from Silent Spring (1962)1

Rachel Carson

The history of life on earth has been a history of interaction between living things and theirsurroundings. To a large extent, the physical form and the habits of the earth's vegetation and itsanimal life have been molded by the environment. Considering the whole span of earthly time, theopposite effect, in which life actually modifies its surroundings, has been relatively slight. Onlywithin the moment of time represented by the present century has one species—man—acquiredsignificant power to alter the nature of his world.

During the past quarter century this power has not only increased to one of disturbing

magnitude but it has changed in character. The most alarming of all man's assaults upon theenvironment is the contamination of air, earth, rivers, and sea with dangerous and even lethalmaterials. This pollution is for the most part irrecoverable; the chain of evil it initiates not only inthe world that must support life but in living tissues is for the most part irreversible. In this nowuniversal contamination of the environment, chemicals are the sinister and little-recognizedpartners of radiation in changing the very nature of the world—the very nature of its life.

Strontium 90, released through nuclear explosions into the air, comes to the earth in rain or driftsdown as fallout, lodges in soil, enters into the grass or corn or wheat grown there, and in timetakes up its abode in the bones of a human being, there to remain until his death. Similarly,chemicals sprayed on croplands or forests or gardens lie long in the soil, entering into livingorganisms, passing from one to another in a chain of poisoning and death. Or they pass

mysteriously by underground streams until they emerge and, through the alchemy of air and

sunlight, combine into new forms that kill vegetation, sicken cattle, and work unknown harm onthose who drink from once pure wells. As Albert Schweitzer has said, "Man can hardly evenrecognize the devils of his own creation."

It took hundreds of millions of years to produce the life that now inhabits the earth—eonsof time in which that developing and evolving and diversifying life reached a state of adjustmentand balance with its surroundings. The environment, rigorously shaping and directing the life itsupported, contained elements that were hostile as well as supporting. Certain rocks gave outdangerous radiation, even within the light of the sun, from which all life draws its energy, therewere short-wave radiations with power to injure. Given time—time not in years but in millennia—life adjusts, and a balance has been reached. For time is the essential ingredient; but in the modernworld there is no time.

The rapidity of change and the speed with which new situations are created follow the

impetuous and heedless pace of man rather than the deliberate pace of nature. Radiation is nolonger merely the background radiation of rocks, the bombardment of cosmic rays, the ultravioletof the sun that have existed before there was any life on earth; radiation is now the unnaturalcreation of man's tampering with the atom. The chemicals to which life is asked to make its

adjustment are no longer merely the calcium and silica and copper and all the rest of the mineralswashed out of the rocks and carried in rivers to the sea; they are the synthetic creations of man'sinventive mind, brewed in his laboratories, and having no counterparts in nature. Rachel Carson, "Silent Spring," in Diane Ravitch, ed., The American Reader: Words that Moved a Nation (NewYork: HarperCollins, 1990), 323-325.1

To adjust to these chemicals would require time on the scale that is nature's; it would

require not merely the years of a man's life but the life of generations. And even this, were it bysome miracle possible, would be futile, for the new chemicals come from our laboratories in anendless stream; almost five hundred annually find their way into actual use in the United Statesalone. The figure is staggering and its implications are not easily grasped—500 new chemicals towhich the bodies of men and animals are required somehow to adapt each year, chemicals totallyoutside the limits of biologic experience.

Among them are many that are used in man's war against nature. Since the mid-1940'sover 200 basic chemicals have been created for use in killing insects, weeds, rodents, and otherorganisms described in the modern vernacular as "pests"; and they are sold under several thousanddifferent brand names.

These sprays, dusts, and aerosols are now applied almost universally to farms, gardens,forests, and homes—nonselective chemicals that have the power to kill every insect, the "good"and the "bad," to still the song of birds and the leaping of fish in the streams, to coat the leaveswith a deadly film, and to linger on in the soil—all this though the intended target may be only afew weeds or insects. Can anyone believe it is possible to lay down such a barrage of poisons onthe surface of the earth without making it unfit for all life? They should not be called

"insecticides," but "biocides."

The whole process of spraying seems caught up in an endless spiral. Since DDT was

released for civilian use, a process of escalation has been going on in which ever more toxicmaterials must be found. This has happened because insects, in a triumphant vindication of

Darwin's principle of the survival of the fittest, have evolved super races immune to the particularinsecticide used, hence a deadlier one has always to be developed—and then a deadlier one thanthat....

The "control of nature" is a phrase conceived in arrogance, born of the Neanderthal age ofbiology and philosophy, when it was supposed that nature exists for the convenience of man. Theconcepts and practices of applied entomology for the most part date from that Stone Age ofscience. It is our alarming misfortune that so primitive a science has armed itself with the mostmodern and terrible weapons, and that in turning them against the insects it has also turned themagainst the earth.