寂静的春天 silent spring 英文读后感.docxVIP

Silent Spring by Rachel Carson “There was a strange stillness. The birds, for example—where had they gone?” “The feeding stations in the backyards were deserted. The few birds seen anywhere were moribund; they trembled violently and could not fly. It was spring without voices.” “On the farms the hens brooded, but no chicks hatched.” “The roadsides, once so attractive, were now lined with browned and withered vegetation as though swept by fire. These, too, were silent, deserted by all living things. Even the streams were now lifeless.” This is a strange scene described by Rachel Carson, who is regarded as “the mother of modern environmental protection movement”. Silent Spring is her representative work which lighted the fire of environmental protection in America and the whole world. Before 1960s, no books or magazines talked about things like environment and ecosystem. Such a phenomenon means that environmental protection had not come to people’s mind and the social consciousness. Indeed, the main opinion in human society from the very past about nature is to “set war against” or “conquer” it. In fact, many of human’s progresses are made on the base of such opinion. Rachel Carson was the first person who doubted the correctness of the belief and brought the topic under focus. In Silent Spring, Carson described a miserable village which was dying under the using of DDT. The village used to be prosperous and beautiful. “In spring, white clouds of bloom drifted above the green fields. In autumn, oak and maple and birch set up a blaze of color that flamed and flickered across a backdrop of pines. Then foxed barked in the hills and deer silently crossed the fields, half hidden in the mists of the fall mornings.” She thought that with the using of variety kinds of pesticide, especially DDTs, the village suffered enormous and irreversible damage and gradually withered and died. Soon it became just like the one described in the beginning. From her fine and smooth describin