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It was a house-that-Jack-built sequence, in which the large carnivores had eaten the smaller carnivores, that had eaten the herbivores, that had eaten the plankton, that had absorbed the poison from the water.

This quote, which occurs toward the end of Chapter 4, speaks of the devastating effect pesticide poisoning had on Clear Lake, California. In this one sentence, Carson conveys how interdependent the natural world is and how deadly the use of chemicals is to a natural environment. By evoking the well-known traditional nursery rhyme “The House That Jack Built,” the sentence also makes the inner workings of the food chain clear even to an audience with little scientific knowledge. These accessible examples are a key strategy since the book’s intended audience is laypeople and not Carson’s fellow scientists.

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