Silent Spring

5 Pages 1336 Words

In a 1962 letter to a friend, Rachel Carson wrote:
The beauty of the living world I was trying to save has always been uppermost in my mind—that, and anger at the senseless, brutish things that were being done. I have felt bound by a solemn obligation to do what I could—if I didn’t at least try I could never be happy again in nature. But now I can believe that I have at least helped a little. It would be unrealistic to believe one book could bring a complete change (Matthiessen 188).
Carson did indeed help “a little.” Her “one book” helped to reform the pesticide industry by removing DDT from products. While it did not “bring a complete change” in the use of pesticides, it did bring about an abundance of criticisms, both positive and negative. In this paper, I will analyze some of the different criticisms of Carson’s work. I will look at the mostly negative criticisms and show who disagreed with Carson and why.
As Rachel Carson opened consumers’ eyes to the dangers of pesticides, she posed a serious threat to chemical companies everywhere. The industries began to threaten her even before Silent Spring was published. As Peter Matthiessen wrote in Time magazine, she was “violently assailed by threats of lawsuits and derision” (188). In “Green PR: Silencing Spring,” Stauber and Rampton claim that Carson’s work resulted in a public relations crisis for the agrichemical industry (16). They state that the Velsicol chemical company attempted to “intimidate its publisher into changing it or canceling the publication.” Also, the National Agricultural Chemical Association “doubled its PR budget” and wrote and released thousands of reviews negatively portraying the book. In addition, “Monsanto chemical company published The Desolate Year, a parody in which failure to use pesticides [caused] a plague of insects that [devastated] America” (16).
On top of the chemical companies’ negat...