Carson’s Imagery

There are two landscapes depicted in the opening chapter of Rachel Carson’s, Silent Spring: “A Fable for Tomorrow.”(Carson 1) the idealized, but typical “town in the heart of America where all life seemed to live in harmony with its surroundings” and the diseased version of that same town after an “evil spell had settled on the community” (Carson 2). Carson uses idyllic, fairytale type imagery to get the reader invested in the town’s welfare, setting the scene as one of peaceful tranquility. Through the use of a mysterious antagonist she encourages curiosity in origin of the negative outcome of that same town, while imposing a feeling of adversity. When we discover, in the second to last paragraph of this chapter, that this is only a possible future, we are meant to feel a need to prevent the described dystopia from occurring. Continue reading

The Fascinating Ecology of Charles Darwin and Rachel Carson

Although Charles Darwin is best noted as the father of evolution, within the Origin of Species  there is also a blossoming fascination with what would become the science of ecology. Ecology can be defined as the scientific study of the relationships that living organisms have with each other and their environment. This budding ecology can be seen throughout, but is particularly evident in Darwin’s “clover-bee- cat” illustration of how “plants and animals are bound together by a complex web of relations”(Darwin 74). Similarly, Rachel Carson shares a ecological fascination with “intersections and connections” (Carson xii) while maintaining an ever present awareness of the whole. Curiously,  in “A Fable for Tomorrow”, Carson employs a strikingly similar illustration of how one organism can alter an entire ecosystems.

To illustrate the metaphor of a “complex web of relations”, Darwin drew on a local clover and its relationship to other organisms. “ I have found the visits of bees are….highly beneficial to the fertilization of our clovers… if the whole genus of humble bees became extinct…in England…the red clover would..wholly disappear.”(Darwin 75) Darwin goes on to explain the correlation between large numbers of field mice and a decreased number of bee nests, raided by mice. “ Now the number of mice is largely dependent…on the number of cats…near villages and towns I have found the nests of humble bees more numerous which I attribute to the number of cats that destroy the mice.”(Darwin 75) With apparent glee, Darwin connects an abundance of clover to a large number of felines. “Hence it is quite credible that the presence of a feline animal in large numbers…might determine, through the intervention of mice and then of bees, the frequency of certain flowers in that district!” Darwin’s delight in making these ecological connections is apparent in the speedy syntax of this passage. We can almost see an excited smile on Darwin’s face as he closes the passage with an exclamation point.

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