A Spring Without the Songs of Birds

Rachel Louise Carson was born May 20, 1907 in Springdale, Pennsylvania. Throughout her life, she became known as a writer, biologist, and ecologist. After earning her Master's degree in zoology from Johns Hopkins University in 1932, she wrote pamphlets on conservation and natural resources and edited scientific articles, but her real passion was in writing about nature and the living word. After working for the U.S. Bureau of Fisheries for 15 years, she quit to pursue her writing career. She wrote books designed to teach people about the wonder and beauty of the living world, but later disturbed by the overuse of synthetic pesticides in WWII, she changed her focus to warning the public about long-term effects of this misuse. She published Silent Spring in 1962 alerting readers to the horrible potential effects of using DDT before dying after a long fight with breast cancer in 1964. Her legacy in her books continues to inspire us about the world and all its beautiful creatures.

Silent Spring opened new doors in environmental thinking. The negative effects of synthetic chemical pesticide overuse was not a commonly discussed topic in the scientific community. Even though Rachel Carson was criticized as an alarmist for presenting such an extreme outcome, her ideas aren't really that out there since she just took individual problems from many places and put them together in a worst case scenario. People thought that if chemistry can make it and it makes their lives easier, all is good! What Carson described is that even if chemistry can invent a solution, it's not always the best option. Production of DDT killed insects and did not have immediate health effects, but look at what happened 20 years down the road!

Carson spreads negativism about the use of DDT and other harmful pesticides, but what does that mean for other countries who need it just to stay alive? Africa has an abhorrent problem with malaria. If Carson convinces enough people and these pesticides get banned, does that make her (posthumously) a genocidal maniac? Her ideas would technically be the cause of the deaths of almost 2 million Africans that could have been saved by pesticide use (it would just kill them later...).