The silent spring

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The silent spring (English title: Silent Spring ) is a non-fiction book published in 1962 by the biologist Rachel Carson and is considered her most important work. The silent spring is often cited as the starting point of the global environmental movement and one of the most influential books of the 20th century. Rachel Carson was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom , the highest civilian honor in the United States, in 1980.

Rachel Carson wrote this book after establishing herself as a non-fiction author and receiving numerous awards for her previous three books, including the US National Book Award and the John Burroughs Medal . She wrote Silent Spring at a time when her private life was heavily burdened. She had adopted the son of her niece, who died early, and had to look after a toddler as a single parent. She was also diagnosed with cancer. Between 1959 and 1960 she was temporarily so ill that she could not work on the book. The book sparked a heated political debate in the United States and ultimately led to the subsequent ban on DDT .

Content and structure

Rachel Carson dedicated her book to the Nobel Peace Prize laureate Albert Schweitzer , who had repeatedly warned against the destruction of the earth by nuclear weapons. At the beginning of the book she also named the scientists who had proofread the individual chapters of her book, and mentioned the journalist Olga Owens Huckins, whose letter about the devastating effects of the spraying flights in her bird sanctuary had inspired Rachel Carson.

Bald eagles are said to have been brought to the brink of extinction by DDT - the pesticide influences the reproductive success of the birds

The opening chapter A Fable for tomorrow describes a fictional small town whose once rich flora and fauna is ruined after the use of pesticides and whose inhabitants suddenly become ill. In the second chapter, Rachel Carson addresses the concept of ecological balance: it has developed over millions of years and is now influenced in unforeseen ways by the rigorous use of pesticides. Rachel Carson calls insecticides biocides because of these barely manageable biological effects . She also questions an attitude that assumes that nature alone has to serve man.

The third chapter deals with the history and mode of action of pesticides and herbicides - a chapter Rachel Carson found difficult to write and which she also feared might discourage readers from studying the book further. Rachel Carson believed, however, that without some knowledge of DDT, chlordane , dieldrin , endrin , aldrin, and heptachlor, the remaining chapters would be largely incomprehensible to the reader. In the following three chapters, Rachel Carson introduces the reader to the concept of the food chain and shows how the contamination of water and soil leads to toxins also accumulating in living things that are at the end of the food chain.

Chapter seven deals with the widespread and ill-considered use of pesticides and the consequences for mammals and birds. As an example, Rachel Carson cites the Aldrin operation in the Detroit region to destroy Japanese beetles that did not cause serious damage in this region. As a result of this Aldrin use, there were numerous symptoms of poisoning in humans and pets.

Chapter eight looks at the effects of DDT on birds that die from eating contaminated earthworms long after the spray flights have stopped. Rachel Carson mentions the bald eagle , which in the next few years was to become one of the symbolic animals in the resistance to the use of DDT, only in passing.

Chapter nine deals with the effects of pesticide use on freshwater creatures, and in the following chapter Rachel Carson sharply criticizes the large-scale extermination campaigns against fire ants . She describes this as the badly planned and amateurishly executed attempt at mass destruction of insects, which has had countless undesirable side effects and for which the US Department of Agriculture is directly responsible.

Chapter 11 is devoted to the over-the-counter pesticides and herbicides that are used in private households without the user being adequately informed of the potential dangers. The following three chapters should prove to be the most controversial in the book: Rachel Carson deals with the health effects of pesticides and herbicides on humans and, among other things, also addresses the effects on fertility, possible damage to embryos or genes, and carcinogenic effects Effect. In three more chapters Rachel Carson tries to show alternatives and advocates biological pest control. She points out the dangers that insects can increasingly prove to be resistant, and emphasizes that the successes that DDT has achieved in combating malaria may therefore only be short-term. In this book, which is aimed at a broad audience, she deliberately avoided the footnotes that are otherwise common in academic works. Instead, at the end of the book there are references (on 55 pages in the original) with precise page numbers for the statements in each of the 17 chapters.

In his cultural history of the DDT, Christian Simon names The Silent Spring as the “prototypical non-fiction book for environmental issues that aims to encourage action by showing the consequences of what is currently known”. The alternation of the presentation of dry facts with passages that reflect the experiences and experiences of individual people makes the book understandable and readable for the layman. Where conclusions are drawn, they are usually associated with the names of leading experts - a rhetorical device known as the assurance of authority. At the same time, the book refrains from falling into an apocalyptic mood, which makes it easier for readers with reservations about the views represented by Rachel Carson to deal with the contents of the book. Christian Simon also notes that almost all the arguments that Rachel Carson put forward in 1962, some of which were still speculative at the time, have now established themselves as critical pesticide knowledge.

Others

The book was first published in 1963 in an unabridged German translation. In 1964 an edition was published by Biederstein Verlag and in 1965 by the Gutenberg Book Guild. In 1968 it was first published as a paperback by dtv and from 1976 by CH Beck in Munich, with a foreword by science journalist Theo Löbsack .

literature

  • Lawrence Cluver , Christof Mauch , Katie Ritson (Ed.): Rachel Carsond's Silent Spring: Encounters an Legacies , (= Rachel Carson Center Perspectives Vol. 2012/7), LMU Munich / Deutsches Museum , Munich 2012 ( pdf and mobi ).
  • Mary Gow: Rachel Carson - Ecologist and Activist , Enslow Publishers, Berkeley Heights 2005, ISBN 0-7660-2503-9 .
  • Patricia Hynes: The Recurring Silent Spring . New York: Pergamon Press, 1989. ISBN 0-08-037117-5 .
  • Swantje Koch-Kanz, Luise F. Pusch : Rachel Carson and Dorothy Freeman . In: Joey Horsley, Luise F. Pusch (Hrsg.): Famous women couples. Frankfurt / M., Suhrkamp, ​​2005. ISBN 3-518-39904-7 . Pp. 259-315.
  • Linda Lear: Rachel Carson: Witness for Nature . New York: Henry Holt, 1997. ISBN 0-8050-3428-5 .
  • Mark Hamilton Lytle: The Gentle Subversive: Rachel Carson, Silent Spring, and the Rise of the Environmental Movement . New York: Oxford University Press, 2007, ISBN 0-19-517246-9 .
  • Priscilla Coit Murphy: What a Book Can Do: The Publication and Reception of Silent Spring . Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2005. ISBN 978-1-55849-582-1 .
  • Arlene R. Quaratiello: Rachel Carson - A Biography , Greenwood Press, Westport CT, 2005, ISBN 0-313-32388-7 .
  • Christian Simon: DDT - cultural history of a chemical compound . Christoph Merian, Basel 1999, ISBN 3856161147 .
  • GJ Marco, RM Hollingworth, W. Durham (Editors): Silent Spring Revisited , American Chemical Society: Washington, DC, 1987. (Review by George B. Kauffmann: Silent spring revisited. In: Journal of Chemical Education. 65, 1988, S. A118, doi : 10.1021 / ed065pA118 .)

Web links

Footnotes

  1. ↑ Simon, p. 156
  2. ^ Robert Friedman (ed.): The Life Millennium: The 100 Most Important Events and People of the Past 1,000 Years , Life Books, New York 1998, p. 55
  3. ↑ Quaratiello, p. 97
  4. ↑ Quaratiello, p. 100
  5. ↑ Quaratiello, p. 101
  6. ↑ Simon, pp. 162f
  7. ^ Bertelsmann Verlagsgruppe, with an afterword by Theo Löbsack
  8. ^ Carson 1962 - Overview of the German editions of the book at DNB.de