In the opening chapter of Silent Spring, Rachel Carson creates a short fable about a quiet town in America where “all life seemed to live in harmony with its surroundings” (1). The beauty and peace of the town is suddenly destroyed by a “strange blight” (2) that causes death and illness. The cause of the blight is the people themselves, who have “silenced the voices of spring in countless towns in America” (3). Carson closes the chapter by explaining that this book will attempt to explore what exactly it is that people have done to destroy their natural habitats so thoroughly.

As Carson begins to introduce the central argument of her text, she juxtaposes the “history of life on earth” with the sudden introduction of widespread changes in the 1900s, as people “acquired significant power to alter the nature of this world” (5). It took “hundreds of millions of years” (6) to create the life on earth people are accustomed to, yet the contamination caused by man is quickly altering the landscape in irreversible ways.

The primary cause of the environmental destruction facing people, Carson argues, is caused by attempts to “control a few unwanted species” (8).