Although I’ve been involved in sustainability advocacy for over 10 years, I had never read Silent Spring before this week. Of course I knew it was a seminal work that influenced the environmental movement of the 1960s. I also knew that chemical industry spokesmen and others tried to discredit Rachel Carson, attacking her credentials and characterizing her as a hysterical female. What better opportunity to read the book than during the Cannonball Read commitment.
Reading Silent Spring over 50 years after it was published was interesting. The environmental issues it raised are not new but rather very familiar. Many of the issues Carson discusses are still debated today. That is not to say that all the same chemicals are still being used in the exact same manner today as in the 1950s. Yet, we still often introduce synthetic substances into our environment, our diets and our homes without fully knowing if they are safe. Our approach to introducing chemicals, greenhouse gasses, and other human-made substances into the environment hasn’t changed much.
In the late 1950s the uses of chlorinated hydrocarbons (such as DDT) and other organic chemicals became fairly widespread in the effort to eradicate numerous unwanted insects. Carson methodically reveals the numerous side effects of the use of these chemicals. Her primary thesis is that in an attempt to eradicate certain insects, other animals were being destroyed: beneficial insects, numerous species of birds, small mammals. In addition, farm animals and people were impacted as well. These unintended consequences came about through (1) direct contact with the poisons, or (2) the bioaccumulation in the food chain and eventually in the tissues of different animals and humans. Thus acceptable levels of chemicals became unacceptable as they accumulated. Further, studies of such chemicals generally did not take into consideration the interaction of one chemical with another. Another theme is that the industries promoting the use of such chemicals had greater resources than the federal and state public health agencies. And finally insects were already adapting to the chemicals quickly, returning in greater numbers a year or few years after the initial spraying. (does any of this sound familiar?)
I’m not sure what we’ve learned in the past fifty years. Carson puts it quite well in the beginning of the book: “It took hundreds of millions of years to produce the life that now inhabits the earth– eons of time in which that developing and evolving and diversifying life reached a state of adjustment and balance with its surroundings. . . For time is the essential ingredient; but in the modern world 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.”
As I read about the killing of thousands of birds of many different species, about people reporting the deaths of birds on campuses, at their bird feeders and on farms and forests, I appreciated what we still have today. We may have Silent Spring to thank for much of the birdsong we still hear.
Cannonball Read V 
I really enjoyed your review – I read Collapse earlier this year, and it also discussed environmental issues. While it is a topic I want to read more about, it also leaves me feeling incredibly bleak and hopeless about our future. Are we ever going to learn? And will it be in time? Sometimes, I think humanity is the worst thing that happened to this planet.
Collapse is pretty heavy, and there are plenty more out there. Blessed Unrest by Paul Hawken provides some nice examples of good things being done, agreed that we need a lot more doing!