Rachel Carson died on this day in 1964, having revolutionised science and culture.
She was born on May 27, 1907, the youngest of three children. Raised in a rustic farmhouse just outside the Allegheny River town of Springdale, Penn, USA, she had ample opportunity to experience the natural world. She credited her mother with instilling in her the lasting love of nature that flows through her writing like a rising tide.
She read biology at Pennsylvania College for Women and carried out graduate work at The John Hopkins University.. She then taught at the University of Maryland and at John Hopkins. She was a marine biologist and subsequent editor-in-chief of the United States Fish and Wildlife Service and a pioneer of the conservation movement in the 1960s. She wrote the classic template for the ecological movement with " The Silent Spring " in it she delivered a bracing and alarming story of how pesticides and other toxic chemicals were poisoning the Earth. Carson's terrifying yet inspirational message instantly became a call-to-action for anyone who picked it up. Silent Spring, which drew its name from the prospect of a poisoned world in which no birds sing opened up a ferocious debate and found herself the target of vicious attacks. But she stood her ground. "Man's attitude toward nature," she said, "is today critically important simply because we have acquired a fateful power to alter and destroy nature. Rachel Carson's Silent Spring is credited with waking the world up to the threat we humans pose to our environment, and ignited an environment movement that continues to spark change today.
The book captured the attention of President John F. Kennedy and was pivotal in the banning of the commonly used pesticide DDT (dichlorodiphenyl-trichloroethane) in 1972. It led to a grassroots movement questioning the safety of pesticide use and public calls for greater governmental control of the industry. Even now, both the book and the author herself remain icons of how a single individual can change the course of a nation’s history.
Carson’s legacy still looms large. As for whether her concerns were “hysterical and alarmist” as her detractors have consistently claimed, or a sobering warning about the impact of human ingenuity, there can be little question that the past 50 years or so have vindicated her. She taught us that no matter how desperate things seem, it’s not too late.
While "Silent Spring" is Carson's most famous book, she published several other books, in 1929 as a 22-year-old summer researcher with the Marine Biological Laboratory. She also worked for the Bureau of Fisheries, and conducted research at its station in Woods Hole. In 1949, Carson became the first woman to go to sea on its research vessel, the Albatross III. Her trilogy of books, “Under the Sea Wind,(1941)” “The Sea Around Us,(1951)" and “The Edge of the Sea (1955)” were all influenced by her first summer in Woods Hole and her many years working at the Bureau of Fisheries. Carson gained knowledge about the ocean and environment during her years spent there. The Sea Around Us has been described as one of the most successful books written about the natural world, it is a poetic narrative about the life history of the oceans.
Carson’s legacy still looms large. As for whether her concerns were “hysterical and alarmist” as her detractors have consistently claimed, or a sobering warning about the impact of human ingenuity, there can be little question that the past 50 years or so have vindicated her. She taught us that no matter how desperate things seem, it’s not too late.
I conclude with a brief extract from The Sea around us.
'FOR the sea as a whole,the alternation of day and night, the passage of the seasons, the procession of the years, are lost in its vastness, obliterated in its own changeless eternity. But the surface waters are different. The face of the sea is always changing. Crossed by colors, lights, and moving shadows, sparkling in the sun, mysterious in the twilight, its aspects and its moods vary hour by hour. The surface waters move with the tides, stir to the breath of winds, and rise and fall to the endless, hurrying forms of the waves. Most of all, they change with the advance of the seasons. Spring moves overthe temperate lands of our Northern Hemisphere in a tide of new life, of pushing green shoots and unfolding buds, all its mysteries and meanings symbolised in the northward migration of the birds, the awakening of sluggish amphibian life as the chorus of frogs rises again from the wetlands, the different sound of the wind which stirs the young leaves where a month ago it rattled the bare branches. These things we associate with the land, and it is easy to suppose that at sea there could be no such feeling of advancing spring. But the signs are there, and seen with understanding eye, they bring the same magical sense of awakening.'
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