Many of Rachel Carson's ideas in Silent Springseem commonplace to us today, but roughly sixty years ago, when Carson was researching her book, most people were not thinking the way she did. For example, if a problem emerged with a certain kind of insect pest, a straightforward and sensible solution seemed to be to blast the pest with lots of pesticides and kill as many of the insect as possible. Carson argues that this solution creates many more problems than it solves, including threats to human health and to the life of the earth itself.
Carson uses "train of disaster" early in the book and continues to pound on this concept in the early chapter "The Obligation to Endure" to make the following point: all of life, plant and animal, is interconnected in a single eco-system. When you violate the way nature arranges life, you create a...
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ripple effect throughout the entire system that is destabilizing and destructive. "Train of disaster" is more effective as ametaphor than ripple effect because it is more dramatic. "Train," in this instance, simply means series, as in a series of disasters, but linking the word "train" with the word "disaster" also would bring to mind the dramatic train wrecks of the nineteenth century, in which many human lives were lost.
Therefore, argues Carson, while it might seem an isolated project to kill off a nasty pest with a pesticide, in fact, it can lead to a chain of unforeseen problems, such as that the birds dependent on that insect are denied a food supply. Also, the pesticide that killed the insect enters the environment, getting into the soil and into the air we breathe, entering our human cells and possibly causing cancer. Carson relies on cutting edge research at the time, but also plays on fear. At that moment, the long term effects of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki during World War II were beginning to be understood, with people near the blast site developing cancer from the radiation 10 or more years later. Part of Carson's "train of disaster" includes the lingering, long-term, radiation-like effects of pesticides.