Rachel Carson: "The Obligation To Endure"

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Rachel Carson’s “The Obligation to Endure” discusses the negative impact that the human race has had on our natural world. “Only within the moment of time represented by the present century has one species—man—acquired significant power to alter the nature of his world” (Carson 153). I completely agree with Carson in the fact that man has indeed destroyed much of our natural world in trying to control it. In an attempt to make ourselves comfortable with all of our luxuries such as most transportation, restaurants, factories, and power plants we are polluting the air, water and the earth in general. For the most part all of the pollution we are creating is irreversible. We cannot simply go outside with some contraption and rid the earth of all the chemicals we have launched into our atmosphere and lodged into our soil. Not only do these toxins penetrate our world over time they also make their way into living organisms making them sick and potentially, if lethal enough, causing death.

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“The crusade to create a chemically sterile, insect-free world seems to have engendered a fanatic zeal on the part of many specialists and most of the so-called control agencies” (Carson 159). I do not believe this statement to be true. Specialists put in charge of these control agencies know what has to be done and how it has to be done. These people understand how our world works and how it must maintain homeostasis and wiping out different species is not how you achieve that. I know there are some people who believe that wiping out entire species won’t affect much of anything as far as the natural order is concerned, but these people are not the specialists. Specialists look for ways to keep everything on earth comfortable, they do not lean in one way or the other and will definitely not knock out an entire species for the sake of human comfort.

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“I am saying, rather, that control must be geared into realities, not to mythical situations, and that the methods employed must be such that they do not destroy us along with the insects” (Carson 156). This statement that Carson makes is a bit confusing to me. How could control be geared into a mythical situation? It either is controlled or it is not controlled there really is no other option. Also, I do not believe that destroy is the best word to use in this case. The whole point of this is to have a healthy balance between the insects and the human population, not wipe out the entirety of one or the other. Control is the key word here, we are simply attempting to control some of the insect population so both humans and the insects can live in harmony.