How overdue is this book report? I bought the book in 1999, used; it was published in 1962. What can I say, I have been a busy boy! Somehow, my copy of Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring” got put high on a shelf and I only recently discovered it again and began reading it. It took a while, and some of it was “dry,” but when I finished, I wondered why I had waited so long. “Silent Spring” may be old, but it made me start to question some of the things going on now. You have heard the old line “history repeats itself,” and this book made me think along those lines.
As I look back on my teenage years in the outdoors, I can see some of what Carson was talking about, even though I had no clue at the time. I remember when my cousin and I were trying to get some baby crows to keep as pets. We would find a crow nest that had birds incubating and keep our eyes on it, waiting for the eggs to hatch. Our thought was to keep making observations of the nests until we could see the young crows had started to feather out pretty good and then climb up and get a couple. Soon, we noticed that the adults were not incubating anymore but we weren’t seeing them feeding any young either. We knew crows were very smart and guessed the adults knew when we were around, thus they avoided going near the nest tree to keep us from detecting it. After a while, we figured something was up, so I climbed to the nest and found it empty. Maybe a raccoon got them, so we checked a few other active nests and found the same thing.
Years later, I got into long-range varmint shooting and I began to notice there were not as many crows around as there were in the mid-1950s. Unknown to me at the time, this was happening to bald eagles and many other raptors, too. It wasn’t until I got involved with the local state-run Wildlife Management areas in the late 1980s that I learned more about what happened to the bald eagle and what was being done to correct it in New York state.
As it turned out, the eagles and the crows had the same problem: widely used DDT had worked its way through the environment and was causing weak eggshells that broke easily before they hatched. Eventually, reproduction became impossible. There was only one nest left in New York state by 1976 and it was unproductive.
Led by Peter Nye, from the Department of Environmental Conservation’s Endangered Species Unit, the state began a program of hatching young eaglets from uncontaminated areas to bring back the eagle. This program worked, along with getting DDT off the market, and eventually the bald eagle was taken off the Endangered Species list.
In 1962, “Silent Spring” awakened the country to what DDT and other widely used chemicals were doing to our environment. It was a slow process, but these chemicals were having a very adverse effect on nature and also on people. So, Carson brought awareness of what we are doing and eventually DDT and many other chemicals were removed from the market. Her book focused our attention on what the government and the chemical industry were doing to us and the environment — and raised some questions for me in 2026.
Looking at the chemicals we use today, is it happening again? These things often take time to manifest themselves; the negative results come much later.
Are we again trusting the government and the chemical industry to protect us? There is a lot of corruption in today’s world and it is hard to know what is good and what is not. I wonder if the fox is in the hen house again. Who is telling us how great wind turbines are as they’re being put up in one of the greatest bird migration corridors in New York state? The people building them! Who is telling us the chemicals we use in farming today are safe? Our government and the chemical industry, the ones who told us how safe DDT was!
There are a lot more questions raised by Silent Spring, and I think if you care about our environment and the health of our youth, then you need to get a copy and read it. Young present-day biologists should be required to read it, too, not to just “know” about it. Sometimes life gets too busy; we forget about the important things and are led astray when we are uneducated.
You can get a paperback copy of “Silent Spring” from Amazon for about $12.