preview

Rachel Carson Argumentative Essay

Decent Essays
Open Document

Many people have questioned a lot of the government’s actions dealing with chemicals in general. Pesticides have been a popular topic since the realization that these chemicals were poisoning the earth. Rachel Carson led this extremely controversial environmental movement with her book Silent Spring in 1962. The book The Gentle Subversive tells the story of the life of Rachel Carson and how even as gentle, polite and proper she was, she was a subversive by encouraging the rethinking of the “relationship between the human beings and nature by shifting from an anthropocentric notion of earth to a biocentric worldview in which people coexisted with nature and not over it” (Lytle 237).
Carson grew up on a farm in Springdale, Pennsylvania with a mother pushing her to learn as much as she could about nature. Her mother was a very educated and well read woman, especially for that time. She encouraged Carson to learn more through and about nature rather than books. Rachel loved nature and all that it had to offer. She began …show more content…

Parts of the government pushed to silence Carson by saying she had ulterior motives behind these claims. “Carson explained that, while she was unmarried, she was not a feminist. She was interested not in “things done by women or men, but in things done by people”” (Lytle 177-178). They also blamed her for the deaths of many due to malaria. ““Her 1962 book Silent Spring detailed the alleged ‘dangers’ of the pesticide DDT, which had practically eliminated malaria.” Without that “cheap, safe, and effective” weapon to control insect-borne disease, “millions of people¬¬- mostly poor Africans- have died due to the environmentalist dogma propounded by Carson’s book.”” (Lytle 214). Despite her illness and all the slander that came her way, she pushed on and forced an arrival of several laws to protect the environment as well as a ban on the domestic use of

Get Access