Insects vs Animals
Silent Spring Why do we not care about exterminating a whole society of insects, but we start riots and revolts over the killing of animals like elephants, dolphins, whales, rhinos, and other nearly extinct animals? We have reasons to kill these animals just like the insects, the slaughter of these animals temporarily benefits us, but what people do think about is what will happen if we eliminate every single insect of a certain species. Rachel Carson is an incredibly brave individual for writing Silent Spring. She had no doctorate in the field of environmental science, yet she still did her research and spoke her mind about the fact of the matter, and that matter being the killing of mass amounts of insects using pesticides. DDT was the main pesticide she was incredibly angry about because of the hidden or unknown effects it had on the environment. If there was one chapter that sticks out more than the others it would be the last one, The Other Road, which mainly focuses on the work Dr. Knipling was experimenting with. In this chapter Carson writes about the different way we could eliminate the insects without harming our environment with the dangerous DDT compound. Ways like sterilizing the males so they cannot get the females pregnant, extracting pheromone from the female and spreading it over a large area it try and mask the real pheromone emitted by the female and the male can then not find her. All are great ideas but how do we know they will be safer than DDT. We do not, just like we had no idea that DDT was going to have a extreme effect on the environment, there is no way to be able to account for every little reaction that the new drug we are spreading will not devastate our ecosystem. I think that it is a well known fact that people overall do not like insects for many sorts of reasons. They annoy us, they land on us, they bump into us, they drink our blood, the carry diseases, they land on our food, and off hand I can only think of