Morbid Irony: A Silent Spring inspired Blog
The life we live in is not one that is not as restricted to the bubbles we have created for ourselves. The very actions we take to control nature are as futile as a snowflake against a forest fire. But, when you have human intelligence and will that snowflake is quite potent and sometimes far more than we ever realized. The constant repeating irony of the human race and creation has become linked unlike no other for we don’t see the dangers of our own creation. The same is true for our relationship with the earth. We constantly create poisons to handle the pest which in turn becomes the very poison that infects from the most innocent of plants to us. Nature wasn’t meant to be fixed. Creativity and ingenuity are human beings greatest and most abundant resource but in our ignorance it becomes our greatest curse. It’s ironic; our greatest gift destroys our greatest most needed resource… water.
Carson’s chapter entitled Surface Waters and Underground Seas begins a systematic treatment of all the areas of earthly life that are affected by pesticides. She begins here with the water, what she calls our greatest natural resource. In the previous chapters, she endowed her reader with knowledge; the beginning of a silent spring, our own obligation to endure, and the types of chemicals being used and their horrific function. Here, her purpose is to show the widespread use of pesticides and the effects of that use on the environment. The irony begins with water. It is the most important of our natural resources and even though it covers the earth, its use for people is limited. With most of the water ocean water and unusable you would think that we would do our best to preserve as much of it as possible. But when it comes to insects all regard is thrown to the poisons and chemicals. From Pennsylvania, where water from an orchard was found to contain high degrees of insecticides, to cotton fields that were sprayed with insecticides continued to be contaminated even after it was passed through a purifying plant. But this is just the tip of the iceberg.
The threat to groundwater is the most disturbing of the water pollution problems. "It is not possible to add pesticides to water anywhere without threatening the purity of water everywhere." Nature doesn’t operate in closed and separate compartments. But our suburban life style promotes that lifestyle more than anything else. It’s no surprise that so many people are aware of the threat they pose to the environment and in essence themselves. But Carson’s tactics to drive her message home is quite ingenious.
Carson skillfully uses a myriad tool to persuade her audience who may be skeptics of the real threats we pose to the environment and ironically us. If the reader doesn’t care about the graceful and beautiful birds that are being killed by the hundreds, she changes in hope that they might care about the fish that she or he takes home to eat after a day of fishing. By describing the path of a chemical from the tiniest microorganism that has been contaminated to the person who eats the fish freshly killed. She brings awakens her reader with words like, “invisible, never detected, and mysterious” Carson is able to play on peoples fear of the unknown to make the reader aware of what we have been forced to endure for the good of progress.
She describes the efforts to control agencies to discover the causes of the deaths and mutations, thus making the reader see the difficulties of cleaning up after a mass infusion of poisons into the environment. This is assisted by her statistics which helps her ethos and logos. Interestingly when combined with pathos the staggering facts make her argument very difficult to counter. The most you can say is deny that the bodies of animals are all fallacies. But this all plays into her subtle idea of irony for we are the engineers of such evils without fully thinking about how it will affect us in the long run.
