The Best Book I've Read for School: Silent Spring by Rachel Carson by Vivian

The Best Book I've Read for School: Silent Spring by Rachel Carson by Vivian - July 2013 Scholarship Essay

"The classic that launched the environmental movement," Rachel Carson's Silent Spring is an intellectually brilliant and influential book that teaches the harms of the dangerous chemicals, herbicides, pesticides, and insecticides that was used in the environment all too commonly. This book teaches the harms of the chemicals people used carelessly to help open the public's eyes to the damage they are not only doing to the environment and its wildlife, but also themselves. This book is the best book I've read for school because it has taught me so many things about the environment and nature's balance, and it changed the way I think about how man tries to overpower nature and his selfish and ignorant efforts to try to control it. For my AP Environmental Science summer work, I had to read Silent Spring. This book has taught me many things. First, it has taught me so much about the natural world around me that I've never known, including information about different types of plant life, insect species, and how powerful and valuable nature really is. Nature has created a whole world with different ecosystems and habitats that are filled with wild life that live in harmony with each other. It has created its own predators and its own prey that live within these environments to keep a natural balance that has evolved over years and years to create the perfect stability. For this reason, many of man's efforts to control species of insects that they deem as problems tend to serve as problems within itself because it lacks the insight of this fact of nature's intentions. It ignores how nature itself provides the solutions to control its insect populations.Moreover, it showed me how man can be stubborn when solving problems and how he needs to look at the big picture. It has taught me the dangers of the harsh and toxic chemicals like DDT, benzene hexachloride, chlordane, deildrin, aldrin, and many more that are carelessly sprayed about the world, endangering human beings without their knowledge. All in all, this book has taught me many facts about the environment and how we must preserve our wildlife, completely changing my perspective about insecticides and chemical controls of insects and showing me that we must always look for a healthier and better solution so not to harm the beautiful nature that is vital to our everyday life. As a result, Silent Spring was the best book I've read for school due to its capability to majorly impact and influence my perspective for the better.