“Those who dwell, as scientists or laymen, among the beauties and mysteries of the earth, are never alone or weary of life.” – Rachel Carson
“Those who contemplate the beauty of the earth find reserves of strength that will endure as long as life lasts. There is something infinitely healing in the repeated refrains of nature — the assurance that dawn comes after night, and spring after winter.”
― Rachel Carson, Silent Spring
Rachel Carson: The Mother of the Modern Environmental Movement
In April, as we celebrate Earth Month, we should credit Rachel Louise Carson, the mother of the modern environmental movement. She was born in 1907 on a farm near the Allegheny River in Pennsylvania and was remarkably close to her mother who loved the outdoors and nature. Rachel’s siblings, Marion and Robert were 10 and 8 years older, and she found companionship in nature while roaming the fields, forests, and waterways of home. She loved writing from an early age. When she was ten, the first of her five articles were published in St. Nicholas, a popular children’s literary magazine. Rachel did well in school and her mother sent her to the best high school in the area where she graduated first in her class.
Rachel’s parents struggled to pay her tuition at the elite Pennsylvania College for Women (now Chatham College). They sold off part of their only asset, the family farm, and her mother did odd jobs. After graduating magna cum laude, a summer scholarship began her long relationship with the prestigious Woods Hole Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, MA. She earned her zoology MA in 1931 on a full scholarship to Johns Hopkins University and taught at the University of Maryland and Johns Hopkins to finance her further education. At the height of the Depression, her PhD pursuit ended when her father died, and she became the family’s sole breadwinner. She was fortunate to find work as a temporary, junior aquatic biologist at the U.S. Bureau of Fisheries where her natural style of science writing was used to pen 52 short radio programs on marine life called “Romance Under the Waters.”
In 1937, Atlantic Monthly Magazine published “Undersea”, her observations of life under the sea, as Rachel’s mother, sister and her sister’s daughters Marjorie and Virginia moved with her to a home in Silver Spring. When her sister Marion died, Rachel and her mother cared for the two girls until they were adults.
After the Bureau became the US Fish and Wildlife Service, Carson was asked to take the U.S. Civil Service Test for a permanent position. She was the first woman to pass the tests in parasitology, wildlife biology and aquatic biology and she became an official, full-time staff Aquatic Biologist. She was promoted to an Information Specialist and continued to write freelance newspaper and magazine articles about the natural world – especially the oceans. Her first book, Under the Sea-Wind, was critically acclaimed but went out of print due to WWII.
Throughout her career, she was an active researcher diving in the Everglades, and sailing on board the SS Albatross III, a Woods Hole Oceanographic research ship. She was concerned by the harmful effects of pesticides on the sea life that she observed. Rachel saw these effects increase with the widespread introduction of DDT during WWII. Her marine studies provided evidence that DDT caused abnormalities in fish. Carson became the spokeswoman for a network of conservationists, scientists, women, and other concerned citizens who had come to fear the mounting dangers of the human assault on nature.
In 1952 she published her prize-winning study of the ocean, The Sea Around Us, which was a unique combination of scientific accuracy and lyrical style. It was serialized in The New York Times and made into a film. It won the National Book Award for Nonfiction and held the top spot on the New York Times Best Seller List for 39 weeks.
Along with The Edge of the Sea, published in 1955, this trilogy of books constituted a biography of the ocean and made Carson famous as a naturalist and science writer for the general public.
After a fifteen-year career in the federal service, she left her position as Chief Editor of Publications for the US Fish and Wildlife Service to concentrate on her writing.
She designed and built a new home in Silver Spring, MD. The home in Quaint Acres was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1991. It was there that she began writing her third book, Silent Spring, while discretely undergoing treatment for breast cancer, in 1958. The book documents the menace of harmful pesticides to the biological ecosystem. It begins with the tale of a fictitious town blighted when the livestock sickens, the birds and bees disappear, the orchards bear no fruit, vegetation withers, the rivers are lifeless, and people fall ill in ways doctors have not seen before.
The book caused controversy and the chemical industry spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to discredit the book and to malign Carson. She was portrayed by these detractors as a communist and an ignorant, hysterical woman who wanted to turn the Earth over to the insects. Fortunately, these personal attacks backfired by creating more publicity than the publisher could afford. During this onslaught, Rachel’s “daughter” Marjorie died leaving a young son in the care of Rachel and her mother. Rachel adopted this 5-year-old grandnephew. Her own mother died shortly afterward.
In April 1963, Rachel Carson was interviewed on national television opposite a condescending pesticide industry spokesman on the CBS Reports episode, “The Silent Spring of Rachel Carson”. In June, Carson testified for two days before several U.S. Senate Committees and called for new policies to protect human health, the environment, and limits to the number of pesticides in use.
After the publication of Silent Spring in 1962, Carson spent most of her final two years in Silver Spring fighting for her life and professional reputation before her death from a heart attack on April 14, 1964. Carson’s fifth book The Sense of Wonder was published posthumously in 1965.
The influence of Rachel Carson cannot be overstated. Naturalist David Attenborough said that after the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin, Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring was the book that had changed the scientific world the most. DDT was banned in 1972.