The Demon Haunted World And Silent Spring

Rachel Carson is a noted biologist who studies biology, a branch of science addressing living organisms, yet she has written a book called Silent Spring to speak about the harmful effects of pesticides on nature. Carson doesn’t write about birds’ genetic and physical makeup, the role of them in the animal food chain, or even how to identify their unbelievable bird songs, yet strongly attests the fight for a well developed environment containing birds, humans, and insects is just and necessary. To Carson, the war for a natural environment is instantly essential for holding on to her true love for the study of biology. Thus Carson claims that whether it be a direct hit towards birds or an indirect hit towards humans and wildlife, farmers need to understand the effects and abandon the usage of pesticides in order to save the environment by appealing to officials, farmers, and Americans in her 1962 book, Silent Spring. She positions her defense by using rhetorical devices such as rhetorical questioning to establish logos, juxtaposing ideas, and using connotative and denotative diction.

In her essay Rachel Carson targets anyone who will listen as her audience. She wants to inform human beings of the effects chemicals have on the environment. Rachel Carson’s audience had little knowledge of the effects radiation and pesticides might have on nature or to themselves. She successfully enlightened her audience to the harm man was causing to the environment not only presently, she also wrote of future ramifications. She predicts “Future historians may well be amazed by our distorted sense of proportion. How could intelligent beings seek to control a few unwanted species by methods that contaminated the entire environment…?” (Carson 615). This statement might make her audience scrutinize their actions through the eyes of future generations.

In the mid-20th century, farmers used a toxic insecticide named parathion in an attempt to control pests detrimental to their crops. Rachel Carson was a biologist who wrote pamphlets (Lear) on conservation and natural resources designed to inform people on the beauty of the living world. In an excerpt from her 1962 work Silent Spring, Carson calls upon the public to take action against the use of parathion by highlighting its catastrophic nature and vilifying the agricultural community for their negligence.

The following involves the second chapter of Carson’s book, Silent Spring that was written in 1962. In this chapter Carson argues persuasively the adverse impacts of pesticides upon the environment and the risks on human health and the environment associated with these “genetic invaders” (Carson, 1962). Many of the extremely diverse people from Carson’s audience targeted were under the impression that chemicals like DDT, at that time in history, were safe for their health. Carson reconciles and attempts to persuade the public to consider the idea that DDT, which in the 1950s and 60s was one of the many chemical pesticides being manufactured and sold to

In “The Haunting of Hill House”, Jackson uses a third person point of view in order to create an ambiguous feeling during the supernatural experiences which leads to confusion of weather the novel falls under the sub-genre female gothic, or not. Jackson starts the novel with a very powerful quote: “No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream.” (1). That famously known quote is indeed very ambiguous, that evokes suspense. The sub-genre female gothic conventions consist of an old haunted house, mystery and suspense, supernatural experiences, women distress during a transition to adulthood or motherhood, repressed emotions, an aspect of feminism, heroic male figure, dark, and horror. The Haunting of Hill House consists of some of the female gothic conventions but lacks some too.

I choose to interpret the representation of cars in The Haunting of Hill House. In this novel, a car is first represented as a means of control over Eleanor by her sister (Jackson 7). However, Eleanor’s stealing of the car transforms the car into a representation of freedom from her present life (Jackson 10). The car allows Eleanor to be free of her controlled life and to begin her own journey (Jackson 10). We observe the same car at the conclusion of the novel as a device used to free herself from her forced departure of Hill House (Jackson 178). She uses the car to commit suicide, allowing her to stay at Hill House indefinitely (Jackson 182). I argue that in the novel the car is utilized for control

Humans today have become illiterate to science and is explanations of the world like the sicencetifc method. This is the reason why humans give love a divine power, it is easier to explain love as a divine power rather than what physically is happening. There is a saying that goes “ love is the closes thing humans have to magic” this statement is a reaction to human experiences of love ,so much is going on inside a person's body that they have yet to understand,so it becomes easier to just give those feelings a name such as love or magic.In Carl Sangan’s book The Demon-Haunted World he states “ 95% of Americans are scientifically illiterate”(6). He goes on to explain the scientific method and how humans are choosing to believe pseudoscience than the science of this

Silent Spring was written and published sixty five years ago. Over time, good works of literature begin to lose their relevance, but great works transcend time. Although Rachel Carson takes a more extreme view than I do, her expose still manages to maintain relevance because she uses universal themes that appeal to the audience’s morality despite the obvious cultural changes that take place over the span of fifty years. Through the use of several rhetorical devices and argumentative methods Silent Spring successfully inspires the audience to not just have a greater awareness, but actually take action and bring about change. First and foremost , to understand Rachel Carson’s perspective, context is crucial.

Silent Spring describes a peaceful farming town changing, “mysterious maladies swept the flocks of chickens; the cattle and sheep sickened and died.. The farmers spoke of much illness among their families. In the town the doctors had become more and more puzzled by new kinds of sickness appearing among their patients.” (135) Even after a massive propaganda campaign by chemical companies advertising the benefits of pesticides, Kennedy states that Silent Spring the only popular dependable information of these chemicals, as government research backed up main catastrophes in the novel. Nearly every country which silent spring was published held environmental hearings and its influence is said to be compared to that of The Jungle.

English Connections 1.8 – A Deadly Science As humans, our curiosity for knowledge never ends, we always want to learn and take in new things, and ideas. Science in a way is a timeline of all the knowledge we have obtained over the years. In the texts I have studied in class, the authors/directors have portrayed their views of the possible dangers of “deadly” science through a variety of mediums. In this report I will analyse the four texts I have studied and discuss the connections between them.

Inheriting the Demon Haunted World Science and religion are very similar, so much so in fact that without religion would science not exist. In the excerpt from Carl Sagan's The Demon Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark, Sagan describes a feeling of a greater force even with science. In comparison, the excerpt from Inherit the Wind displays in the final scenes of the play, that Drummond concludes both science and religion can coexist by placing the Bible and Darwin's Origin of the Species side by side in his bag. Although these two excerpts show the relation of science and religion in two completely different ways, they both show how important it is that there is a common ground between religion and science. Throughout this essay, both excerpts will be analyzed to show Sagan’s stance on religion and science and the commentary that the final scene provides and how that based off of them, religion and science can definitely exist together.

In the book Silent Spring, Rachel Carson’s main concern is the widespread use of synthetic pesticides and their impact on the environment. Carson concentrates on a commonly used pesticide in the 1950s called DDT. She opposes the indiscriminate spraying of DDT because it has profound consequences on the environment, humans and animals. Carson collected information about how the DDT can cause cancer in humans, harm animals such as birds and remained in the environment for long periods of time. Subsequently, the chemicals in the pesticides are extremely harmful so she tries to raise awareness and convince others that there are better alternatives.

This exchange exemplifies the way that scientific discovery can be shadowed by human intuition. In his book The Demon-Haunted World, Carl Sagan poses the most accurate way to describe the natural world; anything that can be discovered by humans that is within our cognitive scope is and should be subject to skeptical scientific examination guided by open-minded thinking in order to account for errors in human intuition, as well as clouded judgement due to emotional responses.

If people were not able to open their own backdoor and see the results Carson was describing, this book would have probably never been what it is today. In the second chapter, she compares the use of these chemicals to nuclear war, which at the time was a threat that people seemed to understand. “People are very worried about the threat of a nuclear war destroying the planet. They should think about the use of these chemicals that are being poured into the environment. These chemicals get into the tissues of plants and animals.” (Carson). This at the time would’ve been a good way to get into the minds of people. Also in this chapter she gets into explaining the history of insects and how they even become a “problem” to people in the United States. This relates well to some of the discussions we had in class about people’s views on the environment.

Other phrases throughout the first four pages use words like "nightmare", "destroy", "haunt", and "anguish" to attract readers to how seriously society takes awareness of science. These phrases get readers to feel the urgency of the views against science in society. The dark phrasing successfully shows that society has taken a responsible view against incorrect scientific application.