Rachel Carson She Was Belittled

Rachel Carson

She was belittled as an anti-humanitarian, nicknamed a priestess of nature, and dismissed as a hysterical woman (Rachel pp). The director of the New Jersey Department of Agriculture once remarked that she inspired a "vociferous, misinformed group of nature-balancing, organic gardening, bird-loving, unreasonable citizenry" (Rachael pp). "I thought she was a spinster. What's she so worried about genetics for" quipped an official of the Federal Pest Control Review Board while ridiculing her concern about genetic mutations caused by the use of pesticides (Rachel pp). A native Pennsylvanian, Rachel Carson had provoked these venomous and vengeful reactions by writing a book called "Silent Spring," a book that was destined to irrevocably change the course of world history (Rachel pp).

Rachel Louise Carson was born on May 27, 1907 in Springdale, Pennsylvania on sixty-five acres her father Robert Warden Carson, an aspiring real estate developer had purchased in speculation that Springdale would become a burgeoning steel city (Rachel pp). However, when Pittsburgh looked the other way, Rachel was left free to spend her childhood roaming the undeveloped and unspoiled countryside (Rachel pp). Rachel mother, Maria McLean Carson, who had been a teacher until her marriage in 1896, encouraged her daughter's exploration of the woods and meadows surrounding their farmhouse and instilled in Rachel her own love of nature and fierce independence (Rachel pp). Maria also indulged her daughter's love of books and often read aloud to her even as a young child (Rachel pp). Rachel began writing and submitting stories to the children's magazine, St. Nicholas, and at the age of ten, won the magazine's Silver Badge, a ten dollar prize (Rachel pp).

Carson enrolled in the Pennsylvania College for Women, now Chatham College, in Pittsburgh with a hundred dollar scholarship, far from the one thousand dollars needed to finance a single year of tuition and expenses (Rachel pp). When Carson sought help from the college president and dean, the women were so impressed with intelligence and dedication that they lobbied friends for personal loads to cover the remaining fees, and eventually Carson sold a portion of her family's land to settle the debt (Rachel pp).

Majoring in English, Carson continued to write and submit articles and stories for the college's newspaper and literary magazine, however, when she was forced to take a two-semester science requirement, Biology teacher Mary Skinker renewed Carson's love nature by conducting classes in the wilderness of Cook State Forest and hiking amid the forest, streams, and wildlife near the interurban railway between Pittsburgh and Butler (Rachel pp). Although considered an inappropriate avenue for a woman, Carson changed her major to zoology and graduated magna cum laude in 1928 (Rachel pp). After graduation, she spent six weeks at the Marine Biological Laboratory at Wood Hole, Massachusetts and then began to work on her master's thesis at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore (Rachel pp). The Carson family moved with Rachel to a house near the Chesapeake Bay and despite a full one-year scholarship, Rachel worked throughout graduate school in the genetics department, assisting Dr. Raymond Pearl and Dr. H.S. Jennings and as an assistant teacher in the zoology department at the University of Maryland (Rachel pp). She received her masters of arts degree in marine zoology in 1932 and continued to teach part-time during the early years of the Great Depression and when her father died in 1935, Rachel was left to support her mother (Rachel pp).

The United States Bureau of Fisheries was in the midst of writing and producing radios shows on the subject of fishery and marine life, known on-air as "Romance Under the Seas" and off-air as "Seven-Minute Fish Tales" (Rachel pp). Desperate for creativity, when Rachel applied for a job after scoring higher than the other all-male candidates, the head of the Division of Scientific Inquiry, Elmer Higgins, hired her, thus beginning a career with the Bureau of Fisheries that lasted sixteen years (Rachel pp). In 1936 Carson became the first female biologist ever hired by the Bureau of Fisheries (Rachel pp). When Rachel's sister Marion died at the age of forty, leaving two young daughters, Rachel and her mother took them in and moved the extended family to a house nearer to the bureau's office in Silver Spring, Maryland (Rachel pp).

When the "Romance Under the Seas" ended, Carson was given the task of editing the material into a brochure and writing an opening piece that tied it together (Rachel pp). Higgins rejected her first original introduction but suggested that she send it to the Atlantic Monthly Magazine, who in turn published Carson's "Undersea" (Rachel pp). Her essay received praise from scientists, naturalists, and literary critics and when Hendrik Willem Van Loon, author of "The Story of Mankind" read the essay, he urged his publisher, Simon and Schuster, to publish Carson's "Under the Sea Wind" in 1941 (Rachel pp). Although the book debuted to both literary and scientific acclaim, timing proved unfortunate with the bombing of Pearl Harbor, and sales plummeted (Rachel pp).

During the war years, Carson was promoted to Assistant to the Chief of the Office of Information in the newly created Fish and Wildlife Service (Rachel pp).

Her responsibility was to promote fish as an alternative to foods in short supply due to the war and between 1943 -1945, Carson produced four pamphlets totaling two hundred extraordinary pages describing sixty-five fresh water and salt water fishes, in addition to a dozen kinds of shellfish (Rachel pp). These booklets were extremely successful and served as information sources for newspapers, magazines, and radio broadcasts throughout the country (Rachel pp).

After World War II, Carson devoted her energy into a series of twelve booklets for which she coined the title 'Conservation in Action' (Rachel pp). She wrote at least four herself, and into all of them related a respect for nature, a philosophy of conservation, and her belief that people should learn to coexist in harmony with nature, a rare insight for government documents (Rachel pp). By 1948, Carson had risen to what had been an exclusively male domain, earning the grade of biologist, and becoming editor-in-chief of the Information Division (Rachel pp). She spent every available opportunity studying the sea and in 1950, her literary agent, Marie Rodell sold pre-publication rights for one chapter of Carson's new book, "The Sea Around Us" to the Yale Review (Rachel pp). For that chapter, 'The Birth of an Island,' she won the George Westinghouse Science Writing Award, and shortly afterward, the New Yorker reprinted parts of the book (Rachel pp). Nature Magazine purchased rights to a chapter as well, and Reader's Digest published a condensed version (Rachel pp). By the time Oxford University Press released the book in July 1951, the book had already become a Book-of-the-Month Club selection and before the end of the month it claimed a place on the New York Times best seller list, remaining there for eighty-one weeks (Rachel pp). Recognizing an opportunity, Marie Rodell re-released "Under the Sea Wind" in 1952, causing Carson to have two books on the best seller list, an occurrence described by the New York Times as a "publishing phenomenon rare as a total solar eclipse" (Rachel pp).

Now financially secure, Carson left the Fish and Wildlife to dedicate her life to writing (Rachel pp). She built a house on the Maine coast and began writing a book detailing life at the ocean's shoreline (Rachel pp). The New Yorker ran excerpted portions of "The Edge of the Sea" and Reader's Digest offered a condensed version, and in 1955 Carson again had a book on the New York Times best seller list, where it remained for twenty-three weeks (Rachel pp).

In 1958 Carson received a letter from Olga Owens Huckins, owner of a private bird sanctuary in Duxbury, Massachusetts, who was horrified one day to find birds dead and dying throughout her property (Rachel pp). Explaining that only days earlier local agencies had conducted a massive, unannounced spraying of the pesticide DDT, Huckins begged Carson to find someone in government to look into the regulations regarding chemical spraying (Rachel pp).

Carson had long suspected the danger posed by the use of DDT and in fact had once tried to interest Reader's Digest in an article based on research by Elmer Higgins and Clarence Cottram at the Fish and Wildlife Service, but Reader's Digest declined and the findings were never released to the public (Rachel pp). Carson began her investigation by contacting other biologists, chemists, and geneticists, and received mountains of data and documentation, including legal suits being brought by sick farm workers and by citizens whose pets and livestock had succumbed to pesticide poisoning (Rachel pp). For the next four years, Carson sifted through thousands of notes, articles, correspondence, and scientific research abstracts (Rachel pp).

In 1962 when Carson completed her book, "Silent Spring," only the New Yorker was brave enough to acquire pre-publication rights, and the condensed three-part series sparked more mail than any other article in the magazine's history (Rachel pp). Parts of the article were read into the Congressional Record by Senator William Proxmire and Representative John Lindsay, and soon after, President John F. Kennedy announced the formation of a special government group to investigate the use and control of pesticides under the direction of the President's Science Advisory Committee (Rachel pp). The book caused a firestorm of public outrage and sold more than a quarter million copies by the end of 1962 (Rachel pp). United State Supreme Court Justice William Douglas called it "the most important chronicle of this century for the human race" and Loren Eisely of the University of Pennsylvania described it as a "devastating, heavily documented, relentless attack upon human carelessness, greed and irresponsibility"(Rachel pp). The fervor of the favorable reviews were matched by the intense attacks of the chemical industry and those it influenced, such as the president of the Montrose Chemical Corporation, the nation's largest producer of DDT, who asserted that Carson had written not "as a scientist but rather as a fanatic defender of the balance of nature" (Rachel pp). Critics labeled her a food-faddist, nature nut, and fish-lover, and despite poor health, Carson responded to these attacks by speaking to organizations, testifying at Congressional hearings, appearing on special televised segments of CBS Reports, and conferring with President Kennedy and his Science Advisory Committee (Rachel pp). On May 15, 1963, the President's Science Advisory Committee made public its report on pesticide use and control, it confirmed every point highlighted in "Silent Spring" (Rachel pp). The very next day, a sub-committee of the Senate Committee on Government Operations met to conduct a two-year investigation of government and industry regulations regarding pesticides (Rachel pp).

Rachel Carson died on April 14, 1964 at the age of fifty-six from breast cancer that had been diagnosed four years earlier (Rachel pp). Before she died she received many honors, including the Schweitzer Medal of the Animal Welfare Institute, the National Wildlife Federation's 'Conservationist of the Year,' and was the first woman to receive a medal from the National Audubon Society (Rachel pp). And in 1980, Carson was posthumously awarded the highest civilian decoration in the nation, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, accompanied with the words: