Rachel Carson’s “A Silent Spring” is a critical novel about the ubiquitous environmental practices around the 1960’s. She begins the novel by using a hypothetical setting that calls forth nostalgia for a reader who can identify with the loss of life in nature. She suggests that many settings in America have lost critical natural elements that create the atmosphere of each season. Carson is able to identify when this switch from picturesque, vivid seasons to the “shadow of death” happens. I am not able to pin point when this switch happened. Carson has been able to see the slow change and progression that humanity’s conventions have imposed upon nature. However, this means that it is only a matter of a few years until my generation can see the change taking place within nature.
In the second chapter, “The Obligation to Endure”, Carson describes an interesting relationship between nature and humanity. In the last few hundred years technology has been rapidly expanding and duplicating itself. Through technology humanity now has things such as Hummer Limos. Something like a Hummer is a material item, not a necessity. Instead, it is a symbol of opulence and superiority. In modern society consumers rarely think of the consequences of the things they buy. The owner of a Hummer is polluting the air and depleting natural resources at a much higher rate than the owner of a Prius. This is just an example of the impact that consumerism can have on the environment. Human technology has affected the environment to such an extent that we are physically seeing changes in nature. Carson describes how many millions of years (I believe she uses the term eons) it has taken for the earth to be the way it is. She juxtaposes this with how long it has taken human technology to negatively irrevocably change nature. I
“For the first time in the history of the world, every human being is now subjected to contact with dangerous chemicals, for the moment of conception until death” (Carson 15). In humanity’s attempt to grow insect free crops many things in nature have been irreversibly poisoned. Humans have unintentionally poisoned themselves. By trying to change the environment humanity has also been changed. “They have immense power not merely to poison but to enter into the most vital processes of the body and change them in sinister and often deadly ways” (Carson 16). In scientific terms this can be known as epigenetic changes. Epigenetic changes occur from environmental factors. At birth one’s genome is set and unchanging, however genes can be turned “on” or “off” resulting in different physical gene expressions. Environmental factors can epigenetically change how an individuals genome is functioning. I found it very interesting how interconnected everything is and that humans have unintentionally created harm for themselves and their environment. There has always been a dichotomy between nature and civilization but in reality they very interconnected.
Since Rachel Carson wrote Silent Spring, there’s been a change in public opinion about dangerous chemicals. We expect that the goods we buy have been tested to be safe and exposure to the pesticides to the degree that we saw in the class film is not considered acceptable. I think the problem today has to do with the lack of information made available to consumers. When we know about a problem it’s very likely that public outrage will force changes, but most of the time we don’t know whether some new synthetic will do us harm. I read in National Geographic several years ago that only a quarter of chemicals on the market have ever been tested for toxicity. That’s outrageous, but there’s very little that citizens can do about it. Who do we contact to complain, and even if we do, is there even a guarantee that something will be done? It might be dangerous to have this “market first, test later” policy, but that fact defines our current system.