Word: silents
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Silent Spring...
Such is the picture drawn of the future in Silent Spring, a new book by Rachel Carson, whose The Sea Around Us earned her a reputation not only as a competent marine biologist but as a graceful writer. Miss Carson's deadly white powder is not radioactive fallout, as many readers will at first assume. The villains in Silent Spring are chemical pesticides, against which Miss Carson has taken up her pen in alarm and anger, putting literary skill second to the task of frightening and arousing her readers. Published this week, the book has already raised a swirl...
There is no doubt about the impact of Silent Spring; it is a real shocker. Many unwary readers will be firmly convinced that most of the U.S.-with its animals, plants, soil, water and people-is already laced with poison that will soon start taking a dreadful toll, and that the only hope is to stop using chemical pesticides and let the age-old "balance of nature" take care of obnoxious insects...
Scientists, physicians, and other technically informed people will also be shocked by Silent Spring-but for a different reason. They recognize Miss Carson's skill in building her frightening case; but they consider that case unfair, one-sided, and hysterically overemphatic. Many of the scary generalizations-and there are lots of them-are patently unsound. "It is not possible," says Miss Carson, "to add pesticides to water anywhere without threatening the purity of water everywhere." It takes only a moment of reflection to show that this is nonsense. Again she says: "Each insecticide is used for the simple reason...
Many scientists sympathize with Miss Carson's love of wildlife, and even with her mystical attachment to the balance of nature. But they fear that her emotional and inaccurate outburst in Silent Spring may do harm by alarming the nontechnical public, while doing no good for the things that she loves...