Rachel Carson’s Strategies for Literary Science and Silent Spring

Abstract

The first publisher of Silent Spring reportedly said that Rachel Carson made concern about pesticides into “literature.” What keeps Silent Spring in print today is not the details of the science she includes, current in the mid twentieth century, but how she helps readers think about scientific issues as accessible and transformational for them. Carson was also bluntly candid when she needed to be: “A quarter century ago, cancer in children was considered a medical rarity. Today, more American school children die of cancer than from any other disease.” Carson could change tone, pace, and rhetorical strategies as needed, to make her arguments effective and memorable—and we can learn from that how to reach a general public now once more ignorant of danger surrounding them.