Ocean Book of the Month Each month in 2007, The Ocean Project will highlight a book focused on our blue planet or environmental sustainability. Books for all age groups will be covered, non-fiction and fiction, prose and poetry. If you have a suggestion, please let us know.
This month, why not celebrate green gardening by curling up with a classic: Rachel Carson's powerful Silent Spring, the book that began the modern environmental movement. First published in 1962, this book sent shockwaves through society when it exposed the destruction wreaked on the environment through the use of chemicals. Carson, a marine biologist and natural historian who died two years after publication of the book, wrote Silent Spring after receiving a letter lamenting the mass death of birds due to DDT spraying. Forty five years after the first publication of Carson 's landmark book, her powerful call for change is now more important than ever. The recently published special edition of Silent Sprin g contains an introduction by Linda Lear and an afterword by E.O. Wilson. These additions tie Carson 's original message to more contemporary issues of our day. While the book's title refers to a future in which no birds have hatched due to the deadly weakening effects of DDT on their eggshells, Carson 's research and case studies run the gamut with a wide variety of illustrations of the dangers of chemicals to our environment. Her analysis of DDT and other synthetic chlorinated hydrocarbon pesticides indicated that these compounds were destroying the environment and posed a great threat to the ecological system. Carson revealed that synthetic pesticides have the ability to not only kill their intended targets, but also move up the food chain to humans. They build up in tissues, rarely breaking down but often building in intensity through continued exposure or changing into forms that are even more toxic by interacting with other ingested chemicals. She cites numerous instances in which people who have been exposed to pesticides fall ill and die shortly after spraying these toxic chemicals, as well as cases in which the chemicals move on to successive generations through breastfeeding and other biological processes. Silent Spring is groundbreaking in its compilation of many localized effects of pesticides. People had been aware of some of their dangers, but no one grasped the full scale of the consequences until this book was published. Farmers applied pounds of poisonous chemicals to their land, far exceeding the recommended application levels. Spray trucks moved through neighborhoods, hosing down the community with poisonous pesticides while children played outside in their backyards. Planes flew over communities, dusting land and people alike with pesticides. This classic environmentalist novel is one with which most people who care about environmental issues are familiar, yet its message is as powerful now as ever before. Her book is written in concise, clear, and often moving prose that allows for readability without any sacrifice of scientific data. At the end of her book, Carson concludes with a plea to move beyond the chemical mindset and seek out biologically based solutions that are safe and sane. This March, take the time to get back in touch with your environmental roots by applying the wisdom in this classic work to the problems of the new millennium.
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Images: © 2007 Wolcott Henry