The Write Audience

Rachel Carson's Silent Spring demands an adaptation of reading from what most of us English buffs are used to. A cross between poetic literature, scientific report, and a persuasion to better the world, many excerpts demand at least a double take in order to grasp Carson's ideas. Tangled up in earthworms and DDT, I've found myself putting the book down on more than one occasion to ask, "and I care because...?" I sympathize with Carson's passion--some of the cases she reports are sickening and scary and make me want to chain myself to a tree and write angry letters to bug spray companies--but when I try to wrap my mind around the vast scope of time in which her writing is set, and her heavy, nothing-we-can-do-about-it-now content, I can already see myself neglecting my sympathy for Carson's cause the moment I get busy with whatever it is I get busy with. In Chapter 5, "Realms of the Soil," Carson claims:

The problem that concerns us here is one that has received little consideration: What happens to these incredibly numerous and vitally necessary inhabitants of soil when poisonous chemicals are carried down into their worlds, either introduced directly as soil "sterilants" or borne of the rain that has picked up a lethal contamination as it filters through the leaf canopy of forest and orchard and cropland?

In examining this statement as I would any other piece of litereature, I notice firstly that Carson immediately uses pronoun "us" to persuade the reader that in the midst of reading scientific reports and assumptions about the deterioration of the earth that will potentially, if not certainly, happen in the next couple billion years, this problem to which she refers, does in fact, concern her readers. I am not saying that Carson's writing is not persuasive or that it is impossible to understand. In fact I find her writing captivating. However, if Silent Spring is a merge between literature, science, and persuasion, she succeeds with all but the latter. It is the nature of man to resent the feeling of being blamed for a mess he did not make, or for making a mistake he did not know was wrong. Similarly, the feeling of guilt concerning our environment when reading about this heavy subject makes me want to drop my book and focus on other things, to some extent. This tendency to become irresponsible toward my actions is one of the foundations of Carson's arguement. If she is fully aware of this human inablilty to barely see or care past one's own lifetime, she should have catered to that more in her writing. If Silent Spring was intended for a wider audience than a circle of eager-to-help-the-world scientists or hippies--which it was-- Carson's persuasion could have been more effective if she hadn't placed so much of the burden of environmental trauma on her readers' shoulders.