Rachel Carson

American biologist

• Born: May 27, 1907; Springdale, Pennsylvania
• Died: April 14, 1964; Silver Spring, Maryland

A marine biologist and conservationist, Rachel Carson is most remembered for her 1962 book Silent Spring, an exhaustively researched exposé that sparked a national furor over the use of pesticides in the United States.

Primary field: Biology

Specialties: Ecology; marine biology

Early Life

Rachel Carson was born in Springdale, Pennsylvania, in 1907 to parents Robert Warden Carson and Maria McLean Carson, who instilled a love of language, music, and nature in their three children. Rachel’s long walks with her mother in the nearby orchards and woods awakened in her an awe for the natural world that lasted her entire life.

At a young age Carson conceived the goal of becoming a writer. When she was ten years old her story “A Battle in the Clouds,” which won a $10 prize, was published in St. Nicholas, a children’s magazine. She continued to write throughout her teenage years and at the age of eighteen she entered the Pennsylvania College for Women (later Chatham College) as an English major. During her first two years there, Rachel contributed many works to the school newspaper’s literary supplement.

Despite her success as a budding writer, Carson changed her major from English to biology midway through her undergraduate career. One of Carson’s mentors, a biology instructor named Mary Skinker, encouraged Carson to think about graduate school. Carson applied to graduate school at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, for the fall of 1929 and was accepted. Before beginning her program at Johns Hopkins, Carson studied under a scholarship at the Marine Biological Laboratory at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution on Cape Cod, Massachusetts.

The following year saw many changes in Carson’s life; her parents moved to Baltimore to live with her, and she received a teaching assistantship at Johns Hopkins Summer School. Carson completed her master’s degree in marine zoology in 1932, and continued to teach until 1936.

In 1935, Carson’s father died. Under pressure to support her family, she went to work part-time at the Bureau of Fisheries (later the US Fish and Wildlife Service), writing and editing radio scripts. She took the Civil Service examination and accepted a full-time appointment as an assistant biologist at the bureau. Carson continued her work for the bureau for the next sixteen years, eventually rising in rank to become editor in chief of the publications department.

Life’s Work

Carson’s government work led to her first article about the ocean, titled “Undersea,” published in the Atlantic Monthly in 1937. As lyrical as it was informative, “Undersea” attracted the attention of an editor from Simon & Schuster, who encouraged Carson to expand it to book length; therefore, in 1941, Carson published Under the Sea Wind: A Naturalist’s Picture of Ocean Life. Although the book received excellent reviews, its publication was lost in the aftermath of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and the entrance of the United States into World War II. Despite its effect on the sales of her first book, the war effort not only provided Carson with a wealth of new information about the ocean but also provided the nation with many new pesticides that were developed as a result of research into chemical warfare.

As early as 1942, when she unsuccessfully proposed an article on the effects of the pesticide dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane (DDT) to Reader’s Digest, Carson was interested in the issues involving the use of untested pesticides. At this time in her life, however, she could not bring herself to believe that human-made chemicals could fundamentally affect what she called the “stream of life” on the land, in the skies, or in the oceans. Thus, she returned to her first love and wrote the book The Sea Around Us, published in 1951. One chapter, “The Birth of an Island,” was published in 1950 in the Yale Review and won the George Westinghouse Science Writing Award. The book was enormously popular, winning the National Book Award in 1951 and the John Burroughs Medal in 1952; it remained on best-seller lists for more than a year. She was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, but returned the money after receiving substantial royalties from commercial sales of the book. Carson’s resulting financial independence allowed her to resign from her government post and devote herself to her writing.

Just before the publication of The Sea Around Us, Carson had begun work on what originally was to be a field guide to the Atlantic shore but later became The Edge of the Sea (1955), a portrayal of “the marginal world” between ocean and land. This book also became a best seller. Carson’s love and reverence for nature, together with her technical training and her expository gifts, made her the perfect person to write Silent Spring in 1962. Initially, Carson intended to write only an article on the effects of pesticides. However, her studies indicated that the widespread spraying of toxic chemicals such as DDT led to disastrous effects on wildlife and possible links with human diseases such as cancer; these facts, together with the incomplete information the chemical industry was releasing about its products and the ignorance of the American public about the effects of pesticides, convinced Carson that she needed to write a full-length book explaining these issues.

In Silent Spring, Carson suggested that scientists needed to conduct rigorous studies on the long-term environmental effects of pesticides. She documented evidence showing a pattern of increasing concentrations of pesticides in animals. She conservatively combined the results of more than a thousand technical reports to form an unassailable evidentiary foundation to support her alarming conclusions. At the same time, she encouraged love and respect for life in all its forms.

The publication of Silent Spring led to a national debate over the use of pesticides. Unable to discredit the scientific precision of the book, her opponents frequently misrepresented her positions, then attacked those misrepresentations as well as the author’s scientific ability. Despite these attacks, the public outcry over Silent Spring led President John F. Kennedy to appoint a special commission charged with studying the pesticide controversy. This Science Advisory Committee eventually supported most of Carson’s conclusions and duplicated many of her suggestions. Carson’s work and her testimony before the US Senate played an important role in the formation of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in 1970. Carson died of cancer and heart disease in 1964, approximately six years before the EPA opened its doors.

Impact

As the beloved author of three well-researched and beautifully written books about the sea, Carson was able to draw a large reading audience for her final book, Silent Spring. As a well-trained scientist who was able to consult with specialists in many fields, Carson was able to write with precision and confidence about the technical issues surrounding the use of pesticides. She was also able to hold her audience’s attention through understandable explanations and suggestions written in a graceful, accessible style. Silent Spring incited a national debate over the cavalier use of pesticides, leading to the growth of the American environmental movement and the formation of the EPA. In 1980 Carson was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom—the highest civilian honor in the United States. Her profound influence on grassroots environmentalism and the green movement persists in the twenty-first century.

Bibliography

Brooks, Paul. The House of Life: Rachel Carson at Work. 2nd ed. Boston: Houghton, 1989. Print. A biography of Carson written by her editor; based on Carson’s private papers, with samples of her public and private writings.

Lytle, Mark Hamilton. The Gentle Subversive: Rachel Carson, Silent Spring, and the Rise of the Environmental Movement. New York: Oxford UP, 2007. Print. An updated examination of Carson’s influence in sparking the environmental movement.

Marco, Gino J., Robert M. Hollingworth, and William Durham, eds. Silent Spring Revisited. Washington: Amer. Chemical Soc., 1987. Print. A collection of essays including a summary of Silent Spring, as well as an essay about Carson’s motives and the reaction to her book by a personal friend of Carson’s; further essays explore the scientific, political, and environmental issues surrounding the use of pesticides.

Murphy, Priscilla Coit. What a Book Can Do: The Publication and Reception of Silent Spring. Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 2005. Print. Examines the significance of Silent Spring; describes Carson’s approach to the book and the response of her opponents, the media, and the public.