Carson Rachel Lousie

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Carson, Rachel Louise

(27 May

1907-14 Apr. 1964), writer and

scientist, was born in Springdale,

Pennsylvania, the daughter of

Robert Warden Carson, a salesman,

and Maria Frazier McLean, a

teacher. Her father was never

successfully employed. He sold real

estate and insurance and worked for

the local public utility company.

Her mother, who had had the

benefit of a fine education at the

Washington Female Seminary, was

an avid naturalist and passed on her

deep respect for the natural world

and her love of literature to her daughter. Mother and daughter, who never married,

lived together almost continuously until Maria Carson died in 1958.

As a child, Carson read and wrote stories about birds and other woodland creatures

that she and her mother encountered on their frequent outdoor excursions. She won

the first of several literary prizes at age ten for a story published in St Nicholas

Magazine

By the time she graduated from high school she was a skilled naturalist

and a student with recognized literary talent.

In 1925 Carson entered Pennsylvania College for Women (now Chatham College) in

Pittsburgh as a scholarship student. She was a reserved but self-confident English

major whose social life was limited by her impecuniousness, but she excelled

academically. A required course in biology given by Mary Scott Skinker, a brilliant

young zoology professor, inspired Carson to change her major to biology in her junior

year. Skinker had a profound impact on Carson, who modeled her life and career after

her teacher. Carson graduated magna cum laude in 1929 and won a place that summer

as beginning investigator at the Woods Hole Marine Biological Laboratory in

Woods Hole, Massachusetts, where she saw the ocean for the first time and embarked

upon a lifelong study of marine life. She won a small stipend for graduate work at

Lear, Linda J. (1999) Carson, Rachel Louise. In, John A. Garraty, Mark C.Carnes.American national biography. Oxford University Press.


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family's financial situation and the depression precluded it. When her father and older

sister died suddenly in 1935 and 1937, respectively, Carson became the sole support

of

an extended family that included her mother and her sister's two young daughters.

Carson found a part-time jo as an aide at the Commerce Department's Bureau

of

Fisheries field office in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1935. She wrote radio scripts for a

series on marine life called Romance under the Waters and, to supplement her

government income, natural history features for the

Baltimore Sunday Sun Magazine.

The following year she entered the federal service as a junior aquatic biologist after

placing first on the women's register. At that time she was one

of

two female

professionals at the bureau, which in 1939 was combined with the U.S. Biological

Survey to create the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

Carson worked her way up the bureaucratic ladder as a science writer and editor

rather than a field biologist. Higgins encouraged her to submit an essay she had

written for government publication to the

Atlantic Monthly

which published it in

1937. The essay, Undersea, received critical notice and the interest

of

Quincy

Howe, an editor at Simon and Schuster who suggested that she expand it into a book.

Under the Sea- Wind appeared just before the outbreak of World War II in 1941. It was

hailed by such scientists as oceanographer William Beebe, but because of the war, it

sold poorly.

In 1946 Carson was promoted from the Office of Fishery Coordination to the Division

of Information where by 1949 she was the editor

of

all Fish and Wildlife Service

publications. She developed a series of pamphlets on the nation's refuge system called

Conservation in Action. The four pamphlets Carson wrote herself are distinguished

by their scientific accuracy and sensitivity to ecological relationships. Carson's

editorial work demanded both wide-ranging knowledge and scientific breadth. It

required that she be familiar with the scientific background

of

every subject that came

across her desk. It also exposed her to a variety of field environments that she later

used in her writing. Carson was temperamentally suited to the routine

of

the federal

bureaucracy and enjoyed the collegial atmosphere. Her writing was encouraged in this

supportive environment, and her emotional and intellectual connection with nature

was given both an outlet and a framework.

Her increasing editorial responsibilities, however, dramatically slowed the pace of her

own writing. It took her a decade to produce her next and most popular sea book,

The

Sea Around Us

published in 1951. One chapter, The Birth

of

an Island, had

appeared earlier in the

Yale Review

and won Carson the George Westinghouse Science


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science writer of the day and won her international acclaim.

Royalties from

The Sea Around Us

enabled Carson to retire from government service

in 1952 and to build a cottage on the Sheepscot River in Maine, where she retreated to

work each summer. The last volume in the sea's biography, The Edge a the Sea, was

completed in 1955 and like its predecessor was a bestseller.

t

contains her finest

poetic evocation

of

life along the shore as well as the delicate ecological balance

between sea and shore. Although it did not garner the record sales

of

The Sea Around

Us,

it was the book she most enjoyed writing because she was able to work on it in

Maine, near her close friends Dorothy and Stan Freeman.

Carson was fascinated by the ocean and its mysteries as well as by the shoreline

of

life between the sea and the land. Her nature writing enthralled millions

of

readers,

introducing them to the myriad of intricate interrelationships that were basic to the

science

of

ecology. Embedded within her writing was the view that human beings

were but one part of nature, distinguished primarily by their power to alter it in some

cases irreversibly. Believing that science and literature were equal in their ability to

illuminate and inspire, Carson sought to educate the public about the natural world in

terms that, while scientifically accurate, also embodied the poetic truths she found in

nature.

Uncertain which

of

several projects to pursue next, Carson completed an important

article in 1956 on preserving a child's sense of wonder in nature, which was

posthumously published as

The Sense a/Wonder

(1965). She produced a television

script for the Omnibus series on clouds and ajuvenile edition

of

The Sea Around Us

and advocated the preservation of certain areas

of

seashore as wilderness in an essay

for Holiday magazine. Before her death, she leant her support to legislation for the

humane treatment of animals, particularly those used in scientific experiments. A

series

of

unforeseen events determined that Carson's next project would not continue

her mystical exploration of the natural world but warn

of

the potential for ecological

disaster as a result of the careless misuse of chemical pesticides.

Synthetic hydrocarbon pesticides, products

of

wartime technology, revolutionized

domestic agriculture in the 1950s because of

their persistence and effectiveness. As a

Fish and Wildlife editor, Carson had been on the periphery of scientific debates over

the use

of

such chemicals as DDT, but her interest in pollutants and poisons began as

early as 1938. Her immediate attention to pesticide abuse was directed by a friend in

Duxbury, Massachusetts, who complained of the disastrous effects that DDT had had

on birds during a state mosquito control program and asked Carson for information.


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Reluctantly concluding that no magazine would publish an article on such a

distasteful subject as pesticide pollution, she embarked on a book, originally proposed

to her Houghton Mifflin editor Paul Brooks as The Control of Nature in 1958. As

her research progressed, however, Carson came to believe that everything that meant

the most to her was being threatened by the careless use

of

these new chemicals.

Likening the effects of pesticides to those of atomic radiation, she became an

unabashed crusader for change in the government's policy

of

pesticide approval and

use. The result,

Silent Spring

(1962), was a powerful critique

of

the Cold War culture

that condoned such crude and short-sighted tampering with the natural world. The

book indicted the chemical industry, the government, and agribusiness for

indiscriminately using pesticides without knowing more about their long-term effects.

Once again serialized by the ew Yorker in advance

of

publication, the book caused a

sensation. In clear, often beautiful prose Carson demonstrated that chemical pesticides

were potential biocides that threatened humankind and nature with extinction. She

used the impact of pesticides to illustrate that man, like other species, was a

vulnerable part of the earth's ecosystem.

Silent Spring

and its author were immediately attacked by the scientific establishment

and the powerful agrichemical industry. Mounting a quarter-million-dollar publicity

campaign, the industry attacked her as an hysterical woman as well as a poor scientist

and accused her

of

needlessly alarming the public. Nonetheless,

Silent Spring

caught

the attention of President John

F.

Kennedy, who called for an investigation of the

issues it raised. The 1963 report of a special panel of the President's Science Advisory

Committee supported Carson's conclusions. Regulatory hearings by a U.S. Senate

subcommittee chaired by Connecticut senator Abraham Ribicoff at which Carson

testified followed. The public responded by calling for state and federal regulation

of

pesticide control programs and the elimination of the use

of

some compounds. Carson

was acclaimed by the public and received numerous scientific and literary awards,

including election to the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

The writing

of Silent Spring

was also an act of extraordinary moral and physical

courage for Carson, who endured what she called a catalogue

of

illnesses. Belatedly

diagnosed with a rapidly metastasizing breast cancer and suffering crippling arthritis,

throughout the four years of research and writing, she was uncertain she would live to

see her work completed. She died in Silver Spring, Maryland, just eighteen months

after its publication.


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were stated conservatively. Some chemicals have been banned from the United States,

yet more powerful ones have taken their place, and some that were banned have

returned to these shores via an agricultural import "cycle

of

poison." Americans still

struggle to heed her warnings, but her witness for the whole of nature has continued to

inspire later generations. Carson was awarded the Presidential Medal

of

Freedom

posthumously by President Jimmy Carter in 1980.

ibliography

Carson's letters, papers, and holograph manuscripts are part of the Yale Collection of

American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

The Lear/Carson Collection, which includes primary and secondary material,

photographs, college reminiscences, misceJlaneous reviews, newspaper clippings, oral

interviews, and a manuscript account

of

the Silent Spring controversy, as welJ as

primary material from related scientists and friends, is in the Department of Special

CoJlections, Charles E. Shain Library, Connecticut College.

Linda Lear's biography

Rachel Carson: Witness for Nature

(1997) provides the fullest

account of Carson's life and work. A view ofCarson's important friendship with

Dorothy Freeman comes from Martha Freeman, ed., Always Rachel: The Letters

o

Rachel Carson and Dorothy Freeman (1995). Lost Woods: The Discovered Writing

o

Rachel Carson

(1998), edited by Linda Lear, is an anthology including unpublished

work by Carson that updates material included in the still valuable

Rachel Carson:

The Writer at Work (1998; a revised edition of The House o Life [1972]) by Carson's

editor Paul Brooks. His chapter on Carson in his book Speaking or Nature (1983) is a

fine critique

of

her naturalist legacy. An ecocritical view

of

Carson's work is provided

by Cheryl Glotfelty in John Elder, ed.,

American Nature Writers

(1996), which

expands upon themes in Carol Gartner's literary biography Rachel Carson 1993).

Frank Graham, Jr.'s

Since Silent Spring

(1970) remains a valuable summary

of

the

pesticide controversy. An important aspect of the controversy is conveyed by the

rhetorical analyses in Craig Waddell, ed., And No Birds Sing (2000). Yaakov Garb

writes about Carson's politics

of

nature in David Macauley, ed., Minding Nature: The

Philosophers

o

Ecology

(1996). Kirkpatrick Sale,

The Green Revolution: The


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industryreactionisreevaluatedinG.Marco,R.Hollingsworth,and W.Durham,eds.,

Silent Spring Revisited (1987).LindaLeargivesanappraisal

of

thefederalscientific

community'sreactionto Silent Spring in"BombshellinBeltsville:

The

USDAand the

Challengeof Silent Spring, Agricultural History 66,no.2(Spring 1992): 151-70.

SandraSteingraber,

Living Downstream: An Ecologist Looks at Cancer

nd

the

Environment

(1997),looksatCarsonasarole modelandaneco-heroas wellasa

pioneerinthemanagementof herbreastcancertreatment,andEllenLeopold,A

Darker Ribbon: Breast Cancer, Women,

nd

Their Doctors in the Twentieth Century

(1999),examinesCarson'simportantrelationshipwith herphysicianGeorgeCrileand

herfightagainstcancer.

Twotelevisiondocumentariesareexcellentsources.CBSReports,"TheSilentSpring

of

RachelCarson"

(1 3),

isan invaluabletool for understandingtheparticipants,and

thePBS "AmericanExperience"documentary "Rachel Carson'sSilentSpring"(1993)

containsimportantinterviewswith Carson'scolleaguesandcritics.Anobituary isin

the

New York TImes,

15Apr. 1964.

Linda

J.

Lear

nline Resources

RachelCarsonPapers

http://webtext.library.yale.edu/xmI2html/beinecke.CARSON.con.html

FromtheBeineckeRareBook and Manuscript Library,afindingaidfor the

collection

of

Carson'spapersheldthere.

The

Lear/CarsonCollection

http://cameI2.conncoll.edu/is/info-resources/special-collections/learcarson.htm

FromtheShainLibrary,ConnecticutCollege,adescription

of

the primaryand

secondarymaterialsonCarsonheldthere;includeslinkstoadditionalsources

of informationonCarson.

Carson Rachel Lousie

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