Silent Spring: Chapter 17 Summary & Analysis

Referencing Robert Frost, whose poetry celebrates the beauty of the rural Northeast that Carson, too, loves so dearly, creates a nostalgia for the beauty of the past, before this modern era of chemicals and combat against the natural world began. Carson directly challenges the public to choose between these two alternatives.

After an entire book dedicated to the many dangers of pesticide use, Carson will devote this last chapter to a discussion of safer, more natural alternatives that take into account the interconnectedness of nature. She leaves it for the public to decide which is better.

This is an example of a carefully targeted alternative, which in contrast to pesticides would have fewer consequences on other parts of the natural community. It is still a celebration of science and the future of human development, but development in the model of nature, rather than that which attempts to supersede it.

These chemical alternatives are at least not explicitly poisons, and although they must be deployed with caution and proper research into their effects on the surrounding environment, they offer access to a vision of the future in which blanketed spraying, which affects entire communities indiscriminately, could become a thing of the past.

Continuing her mission to educate the public about other options, Carson recalls the success of milky spore disease in controlling the Japanese. Although modern ecologists, with more research and knowledge at their disposal than Carson had when she wrote the book, would likely argue that her support of these methods seems to fail to acknowledge the dangers to the balance of an ecosystem that eliminating any member of the community can bring, her optimism is understandable relative to the intensely destructive methods of chemical control.

Returning to one of her favorite alternative models, Carson again explains the ways that importing predators or strengthening other natural checks can allow the system to correct itself, bringing pest populations under control in the way that a millennia of evolution has already provided for. Again, modern ecologists would argue that careful research is required before the introduction of any foreign species – and might argue that there are even better ways to control “pests” than to rely on using either man-made chemical control or non-native species in efforts at biological control – but Carson’s basic optimism about this tactic is more of a reflection of her attitude toward nature and man’s place within it: that man belongs within nature, and not trying to control it.

Carson argues that pesticides, although a tempting reflection of man’s newfound power in the world, have inflated our sense of that power to a point that will lead to our destruction. If we cannot return to a place of respect for nature and the complex systems that it contains, Carson argues that we are hurrying rapidly toward a future without many of those things that have been essential to the experience of being human, and that it is our collective responsibility to exercise caution, conduct research, and slow down the pace of development to preserve our world and save ourselves.