20 THE. A-U-D2U3B- 0 N 3B UsL Leen 
OUR POISONED PLANET 
SILENT SPRING, by Rachel Carson. Houghton Mifflin Company, Bos- 
ton, Mass., 1962. xi + 368 pp., illustrated with 17 black-and-white draw- 
ings by Lois and Louis Darling. $5.00 
It seems to be the prerogative of every generation to believe that it 
is living under the most perilous conditions that have ever confronted the 
human race. Our cave-man ancestors, facing physical violence every day, 
must certainly have had this feeling; so, too, had our more recent fore- 
bears, struggling to hack out a living in a hostile new world. Now we are 
faced with the over-riding threat of nuclear destruction, a danger made 
suddenly vivid by the recent Cuban crisis. 
But while we concentrate on the obvious menace to human survival, 
subtle changes are going on all about us that can mean the crippling or 
utter destruction of the human race just as surely as the hurling of the 
first nuclear warhead. Miss Carson calls on all of us to see the abyss that 
yawns at our feet. Can we stop now? Or will we fulfill the prophecy of that 
giant of our time, Albert Schweitzer, who says in the dedication of Miss 
Carson’s book: “Man has lost the capacity to foresee and to forestall. He 
will end by destroying the earth.” 
It is hardly necessary for us to add our voice to the chorus of natural- 
ists praising Rachel Carson’s latest masterpiece, Silent Spring. Her book 
has all the powerful phraseology, all the poetic expression that one would 
expect from the author of the best selling The Sea Around Us. This is not 
a collection of hysterical diatribes against the use of toxic chemicals, as 
the servants of the chemical manufacturers want us to believe. Her book 
is a carefully documented, scientific analysis of the immense damage that 
has been and is being done to our wildlife, roadsides, streams and ponds. 
For many years The Audubon Bulletin, along with other ornithologi- 
eal journals, has carried alarming articles about the devastation of bird 
life that has followed wanton use of pesticides. Now it appears that we 
have been too narrow-minded, too centered on the birds that we would pro- 
tect. Virtually the whole natural world is in danger of being poisoned. To 
our mind, the most frightening chapter in Miss Carson’s book is “Sur- 
face Waters and Underground Seas,” in which she tells how poisonous 
chemicals have turned up not only in surface streams and lakes, but even 
in supposedly safe and pure water from deep wells. 
Even now we hear of instances that bear out Miss Carson’s warn- 
ing of the danger to man. Last year a little boy in West Chicago died soon 
after he wandered through a tomato patch that had been sprayed with an 
agricultural chemical. For him, death came quickly —none of the long, 
lingering torture of leukemia or other cancers. We wonder — what is hap- 
pening to the many people who have drunk the canned soup made from 
those tomatoes? 
What can we do about all this? First, we can read Silent Spring — 
