Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring gives a strong argument against the use of pesticides such as parathion. Silent Spring was aimed at people with similar ideas to her own, and her goal in writing this book was to inspire those people to rally together and take action against what she believed was unjust and cruel. Her book proved to be a successful motivator and transformed America’s views on the environment. One of the things that made Carson’s book so powerful was its almost apocalyptic tone. Her word choice was extreme at times, but not so much that it was ineffective. Her very first sentence from the passage talks about the “habit of killing” and how humans choose to “eradicate” creatures that annoy them. Already she establishes an extremely negative view on the use of pesticides …show more content…
She explicitly describes the use of pesticides as a war on blackbirds in line 46, but she also brings up the war image in line 24, when she talks about the casualty list of animals that were killed after using a pesticide. She goes on to explain that even animals that were not the target, such as rabbits or raccoons, were also killed. Comparing the use of pesticides to a needless war would have been especially effective to her audience because many of the people who shared her beliefs were the same people who were protesting the Vietnam war, where both targets and civilians were killed. By invoking this thought, even subconsciously, her readers begin to identify with the creatures being killed and those who distribute the pesticides are made into the same enemy they have protested for years. Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring painted a picture of war in the fields and forests of America. She used what she already knew about her audience and her enemy to create an effective argument against the use of pesticides and change the way Americans see pesticides and their effect on the