Rachel Freeman- Outside Reading

 For the past couple of days, I have been inspired by the beautiful weather to read Silent Spring by Rachel Carson. While I've had this book sitting on my shelf for a few months now and I already know a lot about it and Carson, I've never read the whole thing through. I'm only about 60 pages in, but I love how it has already caught my attention with the amount of shocking information that she jumps right into at the beginning. It is so hard to grapple with the fact that Carson's research and knowledge were so overlooked for so long, even after the book was published. I really like so far that she has dedicated different chapters to talking about how the effects of DDT have impacted different factors of our environment, such as water systems and soil, and how they both lead DDT to make their way into humans. She starts by imagining a world that is contaminated by dangerous chemicals and then explains how this is actually happening as DDT became more widespread. It forms the narrative that as a society we gravitate toward thinking that nothing is wrong, but when we take a closer look at all the different aspects of our world through a critical lens we realize that there's a lot that needs improving. 

   Carson also incorporates political allusions into her explanation of how DDT is harming our environment. Since Silent Spring came out in the 1960s, the civil rights movement was at the peak of its legitimacy in the United States media. Carson relates this movement to the contamination of water and how it threatens everyone on Earth with the quote "It is not possible to add pesticides to water anywhere without threatening the purity of water everywhere" (Carson, 42), which is a spin on Martin Luther King Jr.'s impactful words. She really tries to explain how clean water is a basic human right and necessity, just like liberty and civil rights. While they obviously have their own weights, I think it is interesting to appeal to the political topics that people of the time were focusing on in order to get the strongest message across.  While there was a lot of government resistance to making political changes that had to do with civil rights, Carson made another point earlier in the book about the changing times of our society and how our doctrine of rules had to change accordingly. She says that even though the Bill of Rights doesn't say anything explicit about the use of chemicals that had the potential to harm our health, she knowledges that the forefathers and authors of such doctrine were incapable of conceiving that kind of threat whatsoever. It was not possible for them to include regulations regarding such topics because the concepts didn't exist yet, so it is the responsibility of the newer generations to make changes based on new information and values of our society. 

For these reasons, I can't wait to see what other important details she writes about and how I can see the difference her words have made today.