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Silent Spring

Rachel Carson, in Silent Spring, portrays some of the dangerous threats posed by humanity to the environment of the earth. The book remains significant not only because it was the first work exposing such dangers to the general public, but because the dangers have multiplied and intensified due to the failure of politicians, corporations, and the public to adequately respond to the warnings of Carson.

More than that, however, the book is a plea to human beings to completely transform the perspective they have on their relationship with nature. To Carson, the danger is certainly posed by pesticides, by pollution, by other waste from industry and technology. However, just as important, if not more important, is the view that nature is the enemy of man, or at least a wild force which needs to be tamed in order to exploited as humanity wishes: "The 'control of nature' is a phrase conceived in arrogance, born of the Neanderthal age of biology and philosophy, when it was supposed that nature exists for the convenience of man."

What humanity is now having to face is the fact that humanity will destroy itself if it destroys nature. Nature is, in effect, the home in which human beings live, the realm from which all life is derived. What human beings do to the natural environment, then, is essentially what they do to themselves as a race, as well as to all other life which shares the earth with them: "As man proceeds toward his announced goal of the conquest of nature, he has written a depressing record of destruction, directed not only against the earth he inhabits but against the life that shares it with him."

The book offers both hope and despair. This is reflected in the quotations the author selects to start her book, one from Albert Schweitzer who predicts that "Man . . . will end by destroying the earth," one from John Keats who gives Carson her title with a reference to a dead lake where "no birds sing," and a third fro...

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Silent Spring. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 06:25, March 29, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1707273.html