Who’s Who in Green: Rachel Carson

Rachel Carson is regarded by many as the godmother of the environmental movement. It was her book, Silent Spring, that sowed the seeds of passion for protecting the environment – and she wrote it in 1962, years before hippies brought the concept of ‘saving the earth’ to mainstream consciousness.

Carson grew up in the rural river town of Springdale, Pennsylvania and earned degrees in marine biology and zoology before becoming a federal scientist and Editor-in-Chief of all major publications for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in 1936. The job combined both of her lifelong passions: nature and the written word.

Much as she loved science, the work she did for the government must have been a bit dry; she began turning her government research into lyrical prose in her free time, first as an article entitled ‘Undersea’, which was published in the Atlantic Monthly in 1937, and then in a book, Under the Sea-Wind (1941).  Two subsequent books, The Sea Around Us and The Edge of the Sea, made her famous as a naturalist and science writer. In 1952, Carson resigned from her post at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to devote her time to her writing.

Through the remainder of the 1950s Carson wrote two more books about the wonders of nature, Help Your Child to Wonder and Our Ever-Changing Shore. In 1957, Carson began closely following federal proposals for the widespread spraying of pesticides, and her then-unpopular belief that such human actions could have an intense negative effect on the earth led her to focus the remainder of her career on pesticide overuse.

Carson had been concerned about the use of synthetic pesticides since the 1940s, but it was the USDA’s 1957 fire ant eradication program that led her to devote her research and her next book to pesticides and other environmental poisons. She began by gathering examples of environmental damage attributed to DDT and found a community of scientists who were documenting the physiological and environmental effects if pesticides.

Unsurprisingly, Carson was attacked by the chemical industry and some government officials as an alarmist when her book, Silent Spring, was published in 1962. In the book, Carson argued that pesticide use had effects far beyond the mere eradication of harmful insects from croplands. Silent Spring addresses the effects pesticides have on natural ecosystems as well as human poisoning, cancer and other illnesses attributed to pesticides.

Despite the efforts of the industry, Silent Spring went on to gain a wide audience.  Angry critics launched attacks on her personal character, with one calling her “a fanatic defender of the cult of the balance of nature” and another, former Secretary of Agriculture Ezra Taft Benson, concluding that the fact that she was attractive yet unmarried must mean she was a Communist.

But, such criticism didn’t hold back Carson’s book. Silent Spring became a rallying point for the budding environmental movement in the 1960s, opening many people’s eyes to the fact that progress did not need to come at the expense of the environment. It also inspired the campaign to ban the use of DDT in the United States.

Today, Carson’s name also lives on in the form of the Rachel Carson Prize, awarded to women who have made a contribution to the field of environmental protection.

Rachel Carson’s Green Score: 96,331

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