Rachel Carson
Bureau of Fisheries, and became a full-time nature writer in the 1950s. Her widely praised 1951 bestseller The Sea Around Us won her financial security and recognition as a gifted writer.
Her next book, The Edge of the Sea, and the republished version of her first book, Under the Sea-Wind, were also bestsellers. Together, her sea trilogy explores the whole of ocean life, from the shores to the surface to the deep sea.
In the late 1950s, Carson turned her attention to conservation and the environmental problems caused by synthetic pesticides.
The result was Silent Spring (1962), which brought environmental concerns to an unprecedented portion of the American public. Silent Spring spurred a reversal in national pesticide policy—leading to a nationwide ban on DDT and other pesticides—and the grassroots environmental movement it inspired the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency.
Carson was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
Life and work
Carson's childhood home now is preserved as the Rachel Carson Homestead
Early life and education
Rachel Carson was born on May 27, 1907, on a small family farm near Springdale, Pennsylvania, just up the Allegheny River from Pittsburgh. As a child, she spent many hours learning about ponds, fields, and forests from her mother, who taught Rachel and her older brother and sister the lessons of nature-study.
She also spent a lot of time exploring around her 65-acre farm. Nicholas Magazine (which carried her first published stories), the works of Beatrix Potter, and the novels of Gene Stratton Porter, and in her teen years, Herman Melville, Joseph Conrad and Robert Louis Stevenson.
Carson attended Springdale's small school through tenth grade, then completed high school in nearby Parnassus, Pennsylvania, graduating in 1925 at the top of her class of forty-four students.
At the Pennsylvania College for Women (today known as Chatham University), as in high school, Carson was somewhat of a loner. She originally studied English, but switched her major to biology in January 1928, though she continued contributing to the school's student newspaper and literary supplement.
After a summer course at the Marine Biological Laboratory, she continued her studies in zoology and genetics at Johns Hopkins in the fall of 1929.
After her first year of graduate school, Carson became a part-time student, taking an assistantship in Raymond Pearl's laboratory, where she worked with rats and Drosophila, to earn money for tuition. After false starts with pit vipers and squirrels, she completed a dissertation project on the embryonic development of the pronephros in fish.
At the urging of her undergraduate biology mentor Mary Scott Skinker, she settled for a temporary position with the U.S. Bureau of Fisheries writing radio copy for a series of weekly educational broadcasts entitled "Romance Under the Waters".
Carson also began submitting articles on marine life in the Chesapeake Bay, based on her research for the series, to local newspapers and magazines.
Carson's supervisor, pleased with the success of the radio series, asked her to write the introduction to a public brochure about the fisheries bureau; he also worked to secure her the first full-time position that became available. Sitting for the civil service exam, she outscored all other applicants and in 1936 became only the second woman to be hired by the Bureau of Fisheries for a full-time, professional position, as a junior aquatic biologist.
Early career and publications
At the U.S.
Bureau of Fisheries, Carson's main responsibilities were to analyze and report field data on fish populations, and to write brochures and other literature for the public. Using her research and consultations with marine biologists as starting points, she also wrote a steady stream of articles for The Baltimore Sun and other newspapers.
The essay, published as "Undersea", was a vivid narrative of a journey along the ocean floor. In the meantime, Carson's article-writing success continued—her features appeared in Sun Magazine, Nature, and Collier's.
Carson attempted to leave the Bureau (by then transformed into the Fish and Wildlife Service) in 1945, but few jobs for naturalists were available as most money for science was focused on technical fields in the wake of the Manhattan Project.
In mid-1945, Carson first encountered the subject of DDT, a revolutionary new pesticide (lauded as the "insect bomb" after the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki) that was only beginning to undergo tests for safety and ecological effects. DDT was but one of Carson's many writing interests at the time, and editors found the subject unappealing; she published nothing on DDT until 1962.
Carson rose within the Fish and Wildlife Service, supervising a small writing staff by 1945 and becoming chief editor of publications in 1949.
She also licensed a documentary film to be based on The Sea Around Us. With success came financial security, and Carson was able to give up her job in 1952 to concentrate on writing full time.
Carson was inundated with speaking engagements, fan mail and other correspondence regarding The Sea Around Us, along with work on the documentary script that she had secured the right to review. She was extremely unhappy with the final version of the script by writer, director and producer Irwin Allen; she found it untrue to the atmosphere of the book and scientifically embarrassing, describing it as "a cross between a believe-it-or-not and a breezy travelogue." She discovered, however, that her right to review the script did not extend to any control over its content.
Allen proceeded in spite of Carson's objections to produce a very successful documentary. It won the 1953 Oscar for Best Documentary, but Carson was so embittered by the experience that she never again sold film rights to her work.
Relationship with Dorothy Freeman
Carson moved with her mother to Southport Island, Maine in 1953, and in July of that year met Dorothy Freeman (1898–1978)—the beginning of an extremely close relationship that would last the rest of Carson's life.
Carson's biographer Linda Lear writes that "Carson sorely needed a devoted friend and kindred spirit who would listen to her without advising and accept her wholly, the writer as well as the woman." She found this in Freeman. Her plan for the next book was to address evolution, but the publication of Julian Huxley's Evolution in Action—and her own difficulty in finding a clear and compelling approach to the topic—led her to abandon the project.
She considered an environment-themed book project tentatively entitled Remembrance of the Earth and became involved with The Nature Conservancy and other conservation groups. She also made plans to buy and preserve from development an area in Maine she and Freeman called the "Lost Woods".
Early in 1957, family tragedy struck a third time when one of the nieces she had cared for in the 1940s died at the age of 31, leaving a five-year-old orphan son, Roger Christie.
Though the suit was lost, the Supreme Court granted petitioners the right to gain injunctions against potential environmental damage in future; this laid the basis for later successful environmental actions.
The Washington, D.C. However, in January, a duodenal ulcer followed by several infections kept her bedridden for weeks, greatly delaying the completion of Silent Spring.
By August 1961, Carson finally agreed to the suggestion of her literary agent Marie Rodell: Silent Spring would be a metaphorical title for the entire book—suggesting a bleak future for the whole natural world—rather than a literal chapter title about the absence of birdsong. With Carson's approval, editor Paul Brooks at Houghton Mifflin arranged for illustrations by Louis and Lois Darling, who also designed the cover. In preparation for the anticipated attacks, Carson and her agent attempted to amass as many prominent supporters as possible before the book's release.
Most of the book's scientific chapters were reviewed by scientists with relevant expertise, among whom Carson found strong support.
Among many others, Carson also sent a proof copy to Supreme Court Justice William O. DuPont (a main manufacturer of DDT and 2,4-D) and Velsicol Chemical Company (exclusive manufacturer of chlordane and heptachlor) were among the first to respond.
Her health was steadily declining as her cancer outpaced the radiation therapy, with only brief periods of remission. The organization brought lawsuits against the government to "establish a citizen's right to a clean environment", and the arguments employed against DDT largely mirrored Carson's.