The point of view from the video, Chapter 1: Rachel Carson | American Experience | PBS, is from a retelling view. The video's point of reference is that because Rachel Carson published her book Silent Spring, we were later able to correct the way we treat the environment. The orientation of the video is allied with Rachel Carson and her perspective that we are destroying earth and harming ourselves because of it. The objective of this video was to educate viewers on Silent Spring, more so Rachel Carson and the context of the beginning of her journey towards writing Silent Spring.
The video briefly mentioned the controversy Carson faced after the publication of Silent Spring. Being that some people saw her as a communist and a lunatic due to her ideas going against what the public thought, "That human ingenuity would triumph over nature."(American Experience, 1:46). The problem covered by the majority of the video was DDT, (dishloro-diphenyl-trichloroethane) which is made up of condensing choral hydrate with chlorobenzenein concentrated sulfuric acid, and how it affected the environment, especially the mass use of it during World War Two. DDT was a pesticide, originally shelved for decades, now used on the frontlines to stop soldiers from getting typhus: a severe disease that is marked by high fever, muscle and joint pain, cough, intense headache, and red rash, and that it is passed on especially by body lice. As well as getting malaria: a disease caused by a parasite. The parasite is spread to humans through the bites of infected mosquitoes. You end up sick with a high fever and shaking chills. DDT killed more than insects but animals like birds and fish, which in turn harmed the people after the amount used, digested, and breathed. The video presents data like the experiments done with DDT (American Experience 4:48). Where they described how the pesticide killed insects by affecting their nervous system and motor coordination, restlessness, tremors, convulsions, paralysis, and death is the sequence in which the insects die several hours after the absorption of the chemical. In Naples, Italy, the American military started spraying people with hand sprayers to stop the spread of lice to inherently stop the spread of typhus, which did in fact kill the spread of lice and the chance of a typhus epidemic. They sprayed more than a million people with DDT, including children, the elderly, people who wanted to get sprayed, people who didn't want to get sprayed, and the "40,000 Italians dwelling in the jam-packed air raid shelters were doused." (American Experience 6:35) In the tropical pacific, "more soldiers died of malaria than gunshot wounds." (American Experience 7:04) The American military soaked the islands waters and greenery with DDT to kill mosquitoes, preventing malaria from spreading. The video's conclusion is that Rachel Carson wanted to make the public aware with the dangers of using DDT in certain areas and to heed with caution. She went to reader's digest to release this information but in the end they had refused to publish it due to fear of losing readers. Safety tests were not done for DDT to see how it would affect humans and wild life due to its immediate necessity in World War Two. The effects of this were some soldiers dying from DDT in World War Two, but their deaths were recognized as combat causalities. My thought on this is, yes, DDT did save lives in World War Two but I agree with Rachel Carson; There should've been some caution when using DDT in the mass amounts it was used in, on the environment, especially people. Rachel Carson was able to open people's eyes to the harm that was being done to all living organism's life in the world but it was up to the public wether or not to continue shutting their eyes in denial or put some safety googles on and get to work on trying to help keep the environment nourished and clean after learning of all the harm that had been caused by this chemical. It also helped raise awareness of how fragile our planet is and the responsibility that we have as inhabitants of it to care for it as a token of gratitude for it nourishing us and housing the billions of people that live in it. We only have one planet earth, unique and beautiful. So why not keep it that way?
January 1944. The U.S. Army uses DDT to end the typhus epidemic in Naples.
image from the-truth-about-ddt-and-silent-spring
Grammar checked by QuillBot, Sep. 5, 2024,https://quillbot.com/
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