Rachel Carson - Silent Spring

Silent Spring - 2002

Rachel Carson

A book, released in 1962, on how environmental pollution and other environmental problems, causing ecological degradation, are created by the human race.

Chapter 1: A fable for tomorrow
Chapter 2: The obligation to endure
Chapter 3: Elixirs of death
Chapter 4: Surface waters and underground seas
Chapter 5: Realms of the soil
Chapter 6: Earth's green mantle
Chapter 7: Needless havoc
Chapter 8: And no birds sing
Chapter 9: Rivers of death
Chapter 10: Indiscriminately from the skies
Chapter 11: Beyond the dreams of the Borgias
Chapter 12: The human price
Chapter 13: Through a narrow window
Chapter 14: One in every four
Chapter 15: Nature fights back
Chapter 16: The rumblings of an avalanche
Chapter 17: The other road

Review:

In this magnificent book on human's capability to pollute the environment and destroy ecological values, Rachel Carson starts by quoting Albert Schweitzer: "Man has lost the capacity to foresee and forestall. He will end by destroying the earth."
This quote clearly shows what the book is about: explaining how humans are capable of destroying the areas they live in, along with all ecological values and how environmental problems have consisted.

This book starts with a 'worst-case-scenario' in a small town somewhere in America and than describes various aspects of this scenario and how they could take place. Providing you with excellent descriptions and comfortable reading, this is a book you should certainly add to your collection as an environmentalist.

The book focuses, among other things, on the application of chemicals in agriculture, for instance insecticide sprays; a practice that led to dangerous chemicals entering food sources. The author wrote that those chemicals are very dangerous to human health and that they caused humans to be exposed to chemicals that stay in their systems from birth to death for the first time.
This book has opened many people's eyes and showed the environmental problems that our world is coping with today.