Silent Spring

While much of the appeal of Carson s book lies in its mix of evocative imagery and scientific information garnered over decades from journals and colleagues, its force owes a lot to the anthropological dimension of her 

The second pervasive myth that Carson mobilizes is the opposition between cosmos and chaos. The classical vision of cosmos represents an orderly, harmonious world, while that of chaos an uncontrollable disorder. For Carson, the state of nature is the embodiment of cosmos (harmony, balance, equilibrium) while human civilization is presented as a rupture of this order. The concentration of the human population transfigures the environment through building and cultivation, triggering uncontrollable chain reactions that plunge the world into chaos. 

Stockholm. Here, activists from around the world drew attention to the environmental emergency, arguing that international environmental policies had to be introduced to preserve the earth s dwindling resources. 

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R. L. Carson, Silent Spring, Houghton-Mifflin Co., Boston, Mass., 1962, p. 368. 

Carson, R. (1962). Silent Spring. Boston Fawcett Crest. 

Lntts, R. H. (1985). Chemical Fallout Rachel Carson s Silent Spring, Radioactive Fallout and the Environmental Movement. Environmental Histoiy Review 9 210—225. 

Muller s invention launched both the synthetic pesticide industry that exploited his discovery and the environmental movement that opposed its use. Yet Paul Muller, a shy and determined nature lover, shared many of the same reservations about using DDT in the environment that Rachel Carson popularized in her best seller, Silent Spring, 14 years later. In the 1990s, three decades after DDT was banned in most of the industrialized world, international health workers revived the debate over its use. DDT is a cheap and effective insecticide against malaria, which kills nearly three million people annually, most of them young children and pregnant women in sub-Saharan Africa. 

Valerie J. Gunter and Craig K. Harris. Noisy Winter the DDT Controversy in the Years before Silent Spring. Rural Sociology. 63, no. 2 (1998) 179-198. Source for New York Times coverage of DDT. 

James Whorton. Before Silent Spring Pesticides and Public Health in Pre-DDT America. Princeton, NJ Princeton University Press, 1974. Source for lead arsenate insecticide and Terres article. 

Carson R. Silent Spring. Boston Houghton Mifflin, 1962. 368 pp. 

Rachel Carson s book Silent Spring that was published in 1962, was the first popular work to bring the uncontrolled environmental contamination by pesticides to public attention. Well-publicized and well-organized campaigns were mounted in several countries to prohibit the use of DDT and other persistent chlorinated insecticides such as Aldrin and heptachlor. Governments in many developed countries like USA,... 

The publication of Silent Spring (authored by Rachel Carson), which outlined many environmental problems associated with chlorinated pesticides, caused a ban on the use of DDT in 1972. 

Marco, Gino J., Robert M. Hollingsworth, and William Durham, eds. (1987). Silent Spring revisited. Washington D. C. American Chemical Society, 162. 

Russell, Edmund. (2001). War and nature Fighting humans and insects with chemicals from World War I to Silent Spring. Cambridge Cambridge University Press. 

Silent Spring was immensely popular and influential. Carson s work almost single-handedly created modern society s fears about synthetic chemicals in the environment and, among other things, fostered renewed interest in the science of toxicology. It also helped pave the way for the introduction of several major federal environmental laws in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and for the creation of the EPA in 1970. 

Hueper and several colleagues at the NCI were instrumental in drawing public attention to the issue of carcinogens in the workplace and the general environment during the two decades following the work on bladder cancer. Hueper s work and opinions were favorably cited many times by Rachel Carson in Silent Spring. Ms. Carson wrote ... 

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