The Voice Behind Silent Spring

Excerpt from Silent Spring: There was once a town in the heart of America where all life seemed to live in harmony with its surroundings... A pastoral Eden of hardwood forests and bountiful wildlife... Strange blight crept over the area and everything began to change... Everywhere was a shadow of death... It was a spring without voices

Disturbed by the profligate use of synthetic chemical pesticides after World War II, Rachel Carson warned the public about long term effects of misusing pesticides. In Silent Spring (published in 1962) she challenged the practices of agricultural scientists and the government, and called for a change in the way humankind viewed the natural world.

Carson who was attacked by the chemical industry and some in government as an alarmist,courageously spoke out to remind us that we are a vulnerable part of the natural world subject to the same damage as the rest of the ecosystem. Testifying before Congress in 1963, Carson called for new policies to protect human health and environment. Following is an excerpt from her speech: “It is the public that is being asked to assume the risks that 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 fateful power to alter and destroy nature.

“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 atmosphere, 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.”

– Courtesy www.rachelcarson.org