Sci-Fi & Fantasy Girlz discussion

This is the official discussion thread for Silent Spring.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2...

Carson is sometimes called the "Mother of The Environmental Movement" and that's largely because of this book. In fact, I'd argue that even though it is a universally clear and well-written text, it was a success largely because of the first two paragraphs.

Silent Spring is/was a fantastically successful book. The whole thing is up on-line in the form of it's three-part New Yorker reprint:

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/196...
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/196...
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/196...

I just started my re-read (I read it first back in, I think, the late 80s, which is long enough ago that it's close enough to a first read to not really matter) and those first two paragraphs still stand out for their elegance. In some ways the other topics in the book read like she's spoon-feeding us the ideas, and that's mostly because she was, given the thinking in 1962. Much of what she has to say we take as given these days.

Ugh, I started reading this one and it has been a painfully slow read for me. I think the subject is interesting but I'm finding it very boring to read.

I'll give it a chance and try to continue, but after 20 minutes reading I feel like I'm going to fall asleep. :(

I haven't gotten a copy yet.

Yoly wrote: "Ugh, I started reading this one and it has been a painfully slow read for me. I think the subject is interesting but I'm finding it very boring to read.

I'll give it a chance and try to continue,..."

I read the first chapter, started in on the second, finished it and thought, "You know, you could read Madman for a while....

After the early imagery, it does grow a little dry. Her prose is crisp and... strangely professional. Like it's almost like reading a paper for a graduate degree.

Could that have been intentional, Gary?

Amber wrote: "Could that have been intentional, Gary?"

I'm sure you're right. She was, after all, basically starting a new field of study.

Just a lucky guess on my part, I suspect, Gary; since I don't have a copy yet.

Ok. My copy came in today.

Good timing. I just finished Madman so I'm going to pick this one up again now.

Has anyone else thought that she may have implied that something SIMILAR to Colony Collapse Disorder being caused by arsenical pesticides in the late 50s and early 60s?

I guess no one's ready tackle that question yet.

I'll be finishing this thing up probably tonight. I don't usually rate a book on Goodreads unless I think I can speak about it intelligently, and since it was 30 years since I went through this the first time I didn't think I had a lot to say on the subject. Having just done this re-read, however, I think there are a few very important points to make:

Amber wrote: "I guess no one's ready tackle that question yet."

1. I think there are several concepts that Carson wrote about for which there wasn't necessarily vocabulary at the time. She does talk about what we'd probably call Colony Collapse Disorder these days, but without that term, and it dovetails into her general theme, which also includes various agro-business practices, like the perils of monoculture in farming techniques. Carson was talking about a lot of these subjects before they came into the conversation in other ways, and the vocabulary has shifted over time.

2. Her major target is the use of pesticides, of course, and though she focuses on DDT and the eventual ban on that substance does sometimes get attributed to her work, I found her text much more measured than I remembered it being. That is, she wasn't really claiming that DDT was going to denude the environment, but that it wasn't getting the attention it needed. These days there'd be a lot more rhetoric in that language.

3. The irony that Carson died of breast cancer shouldn't be lost on anyone. That cancer was probably not the result of any particular carcinogen in her environment, but does point to a huge issue. That's particularly the case since DDT's influence on breast cancer is still debated. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dichlor...

I looked at the links there, and they make for dry reading, but they support Carson's view for the most part. Those that argue there is no link are also using a very broad methodology, and the actual DDT exposure is getting lost in the metadata.

4. These days the big environmental issue is global warming, and I suspect that has taken away some of the focus from "on the ground" level environmental issues. That is, people are paying attention to green house gases, and meanwhile we get Detroit's water supply. Silent Spring predates Global Warming research, so we can only imagine what she'd have to say on the subject, but in this re-read I'm finding her comments more meant to be informative than I had previously.

5. Because DDT has largely been banned, a lot of the material related to that particular chemical is dated, making large sections of the book a little "done" for our purposes.

Last but not least, I'd probably be remiss not to mention the controversy around DDT that has been invented by several anti-environmentalists. That is, the argument that the ban on DDT has led to deaths from malaria because it prevented countries from protecting their populations against the mosquitoes that carry that disease. Thus, some pundits argue that Carson and Silent Spring are responsible for all the deaths from that disease since the book was published. I've read a few that argue that makes Carson responsible for the death of upwards of 30 million people.

This is, of course, an easily refuted argument, not least because Carson didn't actually call for a ban on DDT, and the ban on DDT was actually only in the United States where malaria isn't a leading cause of death. The later international ban also includes the use of DDT where malaria was (or still is, because it still gets used in certain cases) at issue, meaning Carson's work specifically didn't influence malaria at all. Where mosquitoes carry malaria DDT is still employed to try to kill them. Unfortunately, DDT is no more of a cure all than it is a kill all, and the reasoning being employed by these folks flies in the face of the facts on the ground as well as logic.

And let's not forget that those types of skeeters seem to be developing resistance to DDT just like some the bugs in our corn (maize to you Europeans) fields are becoming resistant to Monsanto's Bt... .

I had to stop reading it. It was both depressing me and giving me horrendous nightmares.

Amber wrote: "I had to stop reading it. It was both depressing me and giving me horrendous nightmares."

It is something of a marathon read. If I were to do it over again I'd dole out a chapter here and there over the course of a year.

Each to their own, Gary.