For Engineering and Science
Rachel Carson - Silent Spring
Parent Collection
DOI
https://doi.org/10.18130/dfds-2a22
Rights
Description
During the seventeen years she worked in the US Fish and Wildlife Service, Rachel Carson learned about the problems of pesticides. Undaunted by the chemical companies' hostility and by the public's high enthusiasm for pesticides, she wrote a book called Silent Spring, which caused a major shift in public consciousness about the environment. Told in 7 sections and includes supplementary materials and pictures.
Body
During the seventeen years she worked in the US Fish and Wildlife Service, Rachel Carson learned about the problems of pesticides. Undaunted by the chemical companies' hostility and by the public's high enthusiasm for pesticides, she wrote a book called Silent Spring, which caused a major shift in public consciousness about the environment.
Rachel Carson's Successful Campaign to Bring the Pesticide Problem to Public Attention:
Supporting Material:
- This essay by Gary Kroll discusses the role of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring in briefly articulating ecology as a "subversive subject" by taking aim at the overly mechanical and reductive sciences and by critiquing the cultural authority of science and technology to control nature.
- This essay by Philip Cafaro discusses Carson's environmental philosophy and asks the question, what are the "foundations" of Rachel Carson's environmental ethics? Cafaro examines how Carson justified her three main evaluative premises (or her two controversial ones, concern for human health presumably needing no justification). The essay also discusses several respects in which Rachel Carson's life and work might point the way forward for environmental ethics. First, Carson's frequent criticisms of human attempts to dominate nature suggest important parallels with contemporary ecofeminism. Second, Carson's philosophy of "reverence for life" seems to support the whole spectrum of environmental activism.
Citation
. . Rachel Carson - Silent Spring. Online Ethics Center. DOI:https://doi.org/10.18130/dfds-2a22. https://onlineethics.org/cases/engineers-and-scientists-behaving-well/rachel-carson-silent-spring.
