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Rachel Carson

Rachel Carson was born in May 27, 1907, the youngest of three children. She had a rugged upbringing in a simple farmhouse outside the western Pennsylvania river town of Springdale. Early on, her mother Maria knew Rachel had exceptional gifts; and she was determined that those gifts not be buried by life in a small town. Maria's disappointing marriage and intellectual frustration made it all the more important that her talented daughter have the opportunity to fulfill her promise.

EARLY DESIRE TO WRITE ...

and A FASCINATION WITH THE OCEAN

Rachel was a quiet child who spent a great deal of time in woods and beside streams, learning the birds and the insects and flowers. She loved books and reading. "I read a great deal almost from infancy," she later recalled, "and I suppose I must have realized someone wrote the books, and thought it would be fun to make up stories, too."

So, at a very young age, Rachel decided that she would become a writer. "I can remember no time, even in earliest childhood,” she has reflected, “when I didn't assume I was going to be a writer. Also, I can remember no time when I wasn't interested in the out-of-doors and the whole world of nature. Those interests, I know, I inherited from my mother." And, she added, "I had an absolute fascination for everything relating to the ocean." In the spring of 1918 at age 11, Rachel published her first story in the children's section of St. Nicholas Magazine.

HIGH SCHOOL YEARS:

"ALWAYS BRIGHT AND STUDYING

... 'TIL SHE GETS IT RIGHT'

Since Springdale had no high school and her family could not afford train fare for her to commute to nearby Allegheny High School, Rachel attended tutorial classes for ninth and tenth graders in two rooms on School Street in Springdale. In 1923 her parents decided that for her last two years, Rachel would commute two miles north across the river to a high school in Parnassus. Despite meager facilities, Parnassus students got a lot of individual attention from first-rate teachers.

Rachel graduated from high school in May 1925, first in her class. The yearbook's editors wrote a poem for each graduating senior and placed it by their class picture. Rachel’s read: ”Rachel's like the mid-day sun, always very bright. Never stops her studying … 'til she gets it right.”

LOVE AFFAIR WITH NATURE

TURNS INTO A PASSION FOR MARINE BIOLOGY

The only school her mother Maria ever considered for Rachel was Pennsylvania College for Women (now called, Chatham College), an elite private college in Pittsburgh with an excellent academic reputation. Rachel entered Chatham already a serious student with the goal of becoming a writer. But, while preparing for a writing career, she changed her major from English to biology after taking a required biology course ... even though she was warned that, “science was too rigorous a field for women."

Following graduation from Chatham in 1929, Rachel attended Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore where in 1932 she received her Masters in Marine Biology. A fellowship for summer study at Woods Hole Marine Biological Laboratory after her undergraduate degree gave her the first chance to see the ocean. Prevented from pursuing her doctorate because of financial difficulties, Rachel taught Zoology at the University of Maryland.

FINALLY,

HER LOVE FOR WRITING & NATURE COME TOGETHER

While pursuing undergraduate and graduate degrees, it never occurred to Rachel that she could combine the 2 areas that interested her so much – writing and biology. But, in 1936 Rachel found a way to merge them when she began a fifteen-year career in the federal service as a scientist and editor, rising to become Editor-in-Chief of all publications for the U. S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

During this time, Rachel also pursued an independent writing career. Beginning with Under the Sea Wind in 1941, followed by The Sea Around Us in 1951, and The Edge of the Sea in 1955, Carson wrote about what she loved most – the marine environment and its relationship with the land and with mankind.

Rachel Carson also wrote articles to teach people about the wonder and beauty of our living world, including an article entitled, "Help Your Child To Wonder." Eventually, her success as an author allowed Rachel to quit her federal position to write full-time.

Silent Spring Launches

The Modern Environmental Movement

While finishing her research for The Edge of the Sea, Rachel Carson noticed that populations of sea creatures and birds living along the shore were declining drastically. She believed the cause was indiscriminate use of chemical pesticides, including DDT which was developed during World War II to assist farmers grow healthier crops. What was not understood at the time was that those chemicals remained active in the soil for a long time, affecting every living creature in the food chain, not just insects.  Rachel's discovery of this astounding fact about chemicals in the food chain formed the basis of her new ground-breaking book, Silent Spring, that would launch the modern environmental movement.

Although based on her meticulous research into the work of many scientists, Carson opens Silent Spring in Chapter One with a fictional story entitled, "A Fable for Tomorrow."  It tells of a town where all life seemed to live in harmony with its surroundings until a "strange blight" falls upon the town and its countryside that was famous for its abundance and variety of bird life. The tale of blight and its effects gripped the reader in a way that no cold, calculated recitation of fact could.

After the book's publication in 1962, Rachel Carson testified before two U.S. Senate committees investigating environmental hazards. Soft-spoken and polite, yet firm in her beliefs, she was an effective advocate for the fledgling environmental movement.

Carson finished Silent Spring in spite of the loss of her mother after a long illness and her own recurring illness. On April 14, 1964 Rachel Carson died from cancer.

Her Legacy:

One Of The 100 Most Important Americans

Of 20th Century

Rachel Carson is now widely recognized as one of the founders of the modern environmental movement.

After reading Silent Spring, President John F. Kennedy became a champion of its essential findings. Soon, federal and state laws were enacted governing protection of the air and water, wildlife, and humans from the effectsof pesticides. In 1970 the Environmental Protection Agency was created to protect the total environment. For her pioneering work, Life magazine selected Rachel Carson as one of the 100 most important Americans of the 20th Century.