Rereading Silent Spring
Rereading Silent Spring
This chapter discusses Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, a bestseller which alerted Americans to the hazards of insecticides. Carson's prose revealed hazards found with the indiscriminate use of DDT and other chlorinated hydrocarbons. With the exception of malathion, organophosphates posed greater risks to humans and wildlife. However, organophosphates had one notable advantage over DDT and the chlorinated hydrocarbons: organophosphates broke down into relatively harmless components over the course of weeks or even days, whereas chlorinated hydrocarbons accumulated in ecosystems and the bodies of wildlife and humans. In general, Silent Spring painted a sharp picture of toxicological risk in layman's terms.
Keywords: insecticides, Rachel Carson, DDT, chlorinated hyrdocarbons, organophosphate
Yale Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.
Please, subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian.
To troubleshoot, please check our FAQs , and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us.