Rachel Carson Pesticide Analysis

The year is 1962, and almost all of America accepts the excessive use of pesticide DDT, except one. While everyone blindly went along with what the corporate companies had to say, environmentalist Rachel Carson sought to get behind the mystery that was pesticide use in America. She saw through the chemical companies’ lies, and with the use of her book, strove to end their deathly practices. Silent Spring voiced her opinion over the catastrophic consequences of this chemical abuse and could be considered the prime factor that led to the ignition of regulation programs, such as the Environmental Protection Agency. In her infamous publication, Carson questions the harmful effects of pesticide use, the unfair practices of chemical companies, and
The people using these pesticides ignored other solutions, as demonstrated by the author, which in turn cause the audience to question the chemical companies’ capabilities and look to the environmentalist for answers. Carson later goes on to state that chemical companies are waging war against Mother Nature, using farmers to do their dirty work. She describes the farmers as puppets sent off to complete “their mission of death” for the companies’ “needless war.” During this time frame, America is taking part in the Vietnam War, thus the idea of war and the terror it brings is still fresh in the audience’s minds. This militaristic diction calls upon their feeling and puts emphasis on the amount of lives that suffer in such events, and for what? A war with no gain and many losses, such as the war in both Vietnam and nature’s front door. Carson evokes the audience’s anger and frustration linked to the current events and directs them towards the metaphorical war the chemical companies are waging in order to convince the public that pesticide use is but another dead end and should be stopped immediately. What might be even worse than the companies’ manipulative actions, however, is that the
Birds, one of these innocent victims, are “finding themselves a direct target of poisons.” The negative connotation implies that the birds, who haven't done anything wrong, are being treated like pests and are suffering unjustly because of that. Whether the audience sees foul as a nuisance or not, the extremity of poisons may make them rethink if using pesticides is the correct way to go. Not only have birds found themselves victims, but an unprecedented number of them have died from pesticide use already. Carson describes the death toll as a scale where, in one pan, there’s “the leaves that might have been eaten” and, in the other, “the pitiful heaps of many-hued feathers, the lifeless remains of birds.” The sentence structure, itself, acts as the metaphorical scale and puts emphasis on how there have been so much death because of pesticide usage. If anything, the excessive description of corpses would disturb the audience and call upon their empathy to ban pesticides in order to prevent any more suffering. Birds weren’t the only ones in harms way, for “rabbits or raccoons or opossums” also lived in the affected areas. By providing specific examples of woodland critters, Carson slyly takes advantage of her audience’s interests and uses them in her favor. Pesticides may kill the “pests” that are