Environmental heroes come in many stripes. We revere each for distinct contributions: Audubon for his brush-strokes, Thoreau for his austere vision, Muir for his eloquent zeal. Rachel Carson joined that pantheon when her 1962 book, Silent Spring, sparked a firestorm of controversy over chemical pesticides. Though a reluctant crusader, she became lauded nationally and internationally as the courageous mother of the modern environmental movement.
Those other legendary figures feel remote to most of us, as inaccessible as Muir’s Sierra peaks. But Rachel Carson, at least in the D.C. area, was our neighbor. She studied marine biology at Baltimore’s Johns Hopkins University, then moved to a Silver Spring ranch house where she fed birds in her backyard. Carson edited publications for the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service until her first best-seller, The Sea Around Us, set her free. And she loved to join friends on outings with the District of Columbia Audubon Society (ANS’s original name). On trips to Chincoteague, Hawk Mountain, and the C&O; Canal, Carson gathered notes and impressions to enrich her eloquent essays, and, like the rest of us, simply enjoyed wetting her toes in the sand and watching the sky for hawks.
It’s no surprise, then, that our region would join the nationwide celebration of our hometown hero’s May 27th centennial birthday. All year long, many activities will center around Springdale, Pennsylvania, where Carson was born in a small farmhouse 100 springs ago. For our contribution, the News invited several of Carson’s myriad admirers to reflect on her impacts on their lives. Whether they knew “Miss Carson” as a shy teenager or through a decade of scholarly research, each writer expresses a unique relationship with Carson’s books, ideas, discoveries, and fears. We hope that everyone in Rachel Carson’s neighborhood takes time this spring for a piece of cake, a toast to Carson’s legacy, and a walk to hear the birds sing. ~ Julie Dunlap
Kent Minichiello teaches in the ANS-USDA Graduate School’s Natural History Field Studies Program ~ My understanding of environmental problems began in Shirley Briggs’ Conservation Philosophy course, which centered on the two giants of the modern environmental movement: Aldo Leopold and Rachel Carson. Shirley was a close friend of Rachel’s and enlivened the course with tales of excursions with her to the seashore and the mountains. Through these stories and more personal anecdotes, Rachel became a warm and humorous presence in the classroom, the living person behind the prose-poet of The Sea Around Us and the gifted polemicist of Silent Spring.
As the years passed, I progressed from Shirley’s student to her understudy, to her co-teacher, and finally to her successor as teacher of Conservation Philosophy. With continued tutelage and study, my understanding of Carson’s importance increased, and now I see her as a pivotal figure in 20th-century America and the author of its most important book. For she was the only writer with the popular reach to awaken the public to the ubiquity and seriousness of environmental problems. Her ecological, holistic point of view brought what had been narrowly-seen public health questions into focus as major interrelated threats to the well-being and even survival of all life; she opened the intellectual way for the concept of sustainable living to enter the public mind.
Jerry R. Longcore, Orono, Maine, retired federal wildlife biologist ~Rachel Carson influenced how the public viewed chemicals in the environment, but she was attacked for her conclusions, and her character was sullied. The Patuxent Wildlife Research Center staff helped determine which species were susceptible to shell thinning from DDT. I was asked to test captive black ducks. At the DDT hearings, a dozen or so Patuxent scientists testified. Because the hearing examiner allowed industry lawyers to badger the scientists, Richard Porter and I refused to testify, thereby halting the hearing. Eventually, the hearing resumed, and I presented testimony and introduced a photo of a crushed black duck eggshell. Industry lawyers objected, but it was allowed in the record. A lawyer’s last desperate effort was to question my credibility. . . Thus, Rachel Carson influenced my career and informed me of the political realities that influence science. Even when under personal attack, Rachel Carson let her objective data carry the day, and countless avian species have benefitted. I salute her!
Susan Rosen, Professor of English at Anne Arundel Community College and editor ofShorewords: A Collection of American Women’s Coastal Writings (University of Virginia Press, 2003) ~ Before the Environmental Protection Agency existed, before Silent Spring was published, before Rachel Carson triggered in our country an urgency to protect our damaged environment, there existed a Rachel Carson who loved the mysterious “edge of the sea.” I am reminded of this earlier Rachel Carson whenever I walk along the shore or go tide pooling. I have spent many an hour poking in and around tide pools, surprised when I spot an octopus stretching its tentacles out from under a ridge, or delighted when scrambling into coastal caves whose floors wiggle and click with the movement of shore crabs, a sound eerily reminiscent of women in heels speed-walking down Madison Ave. The experience of peering into the tide pools reminds me of my childhood wishes that I had gills rather than lungs or had been born a mermaid or perhaps another sort of sea creature, but most of all, my time spent wandering along the shore reminds me that it is Rachel Carson who continues inspiring me and others to ponder the shore’s dual nature, “a shifting, kaleidoscopic pattern in which there is no finality, no ultimate and fixed reality—earth becoming fluid as the sea itself.”
FROM THE ARCHIVES
The news of Rachel Carson’s death has come just as this magazine was about to be printed, the last issue in which her name will appear as Contributing Editor and as Honorary Vice President of
our [Audubon Naturalist] Society. . . . In countless quiet words of advice and encouragement, in the clear and inspiring way in which she could make complex matters seem coherent and difficult problems possible to overcome, she has steered us toward larger horizons and has made the journey an adventure.
Rachel Carson joined our Society in 1945. She was a member of our Board of Directors twice, from 1947 to 1949 and from 1955 to 1958, and was elected Honorary Vice President in 1952. . . . her wisdom and grace will be sorely missed by all who know her writing or have heard her speak. But her friends will miss, as much, her infectious delight in small daily joys, and her gay and mischievous humor. Remembering her should make us staunch in the struggle to preserve the wonders and vitality of our earth and should remind us how to greet life bravely, with laughter and a buoyant spirit. ~ Shirley Briggs, The Atlantic Naturalist, Vol. 19 No. 2, 1964.
Adapted by Jeffrey S. Cramer from the unfinished memoirs of Rachel Carson’s editor, Paul Brooks ~ If I had to choose a single revealing moment during a long friendship with Rachel, it would be shortly before dusk one July evening at her Maine cottage, while she was working on The Edge of the Sea. We had spent an hour after supper examining sea creatures under her brightly lit binocular microscope: tube worms, rhythmically projecting and withdrawing their pink, fanlike hydroids; green sponges whose ancestry goes back to the earliest record of life on earth. Afterward, with pail and flashlight in hand, she stepped carefully over the kelp-covered rocks to return the living creatures to their home. This, I think, is what Albert Schweitzer (to whom Silent Spring is dedicated) meant by “reverence for life.” In one form or another it lies behind everything that Rachel Carson wrote.
Chandler S. Robbins, Wildlife Research Biologist (retired), Patuxent Wildlife Research Center, Laurel, Maryland ~ One of my first assignments as a fledgling Junior Biologist with the U. S. Fish and Wildlife Service at the Patuxent Research Refuge was to work with the late Robert E. Stewart Sr. on a study of the effects of aerial spraying of DDT on breeding bird populations in the floodplain forest along the Patuxent River in Prince George’s County, Maryland, 1945-1949. Our reports, before being submitted for publication, had to be sent to Washington to be checked by the Service’s scientific editor, who at that time was Rachel Carson. Concurrently, other Patuxent scientists were working on field and laboratory DDT studies on other organisms. These papers were published in various issues of the Journal of Wildlife Management, 1946-1951.
I had known Rachel only as an expert editor until she suddenly became famous as the author of The Sea Around Us (1951) and then Silent Spring (1962).Silent Spring was highly publicized by the press and created a tidal wave of public opinion in favor of banning indis-criminant use of DDT. It still took another ten years before the DDT ban was put into effect on December 31, 1972. Thus 26 years elapsed between publication of the first research papers showing environmental effects of DDT and the passing of protective legislation. . . .
Every generation needs a Rachel Carson. . . .
Linda Lear, author of Rachel Carson: Witness for Nature (Holt, 1997) and Beatrix Potter: A Life in Nature (St. Martin’s Press, 2007) ~ I vividly recall the sunny afternoon in
June 1962 when I pulled a copy of the Saturday Review of Literature from my family mailbox and studied the famous photograph of Rachel Carson by Erich Hartmann on the magazine’s cover. Rachel and I grew up only a few Allegheny hills apart, but I was to discover we shared more than just common geography and growing up in the industrial pollution of the Pittsburgh area. Our life journeys intersected in so many ways that I finally understood that somehow I was destined to write her life.
In the course of my research, I discovered that my grandmother knew Carson’s mother from local women’s church circles. Rachel’s best friend in college, Dorothy Thompson Seif, had been my high school biology teacher. Mary Scott Skinker, Carson’s brave mentor in biology, used to take Rachel and her classmates on collecting trips to the cranberry bog where years later my parents built a house. Carson came to the Washington area to teach and to work for the government, and I followed in her footsteps a quarter century later.
It took me over a decade to write Carson’s life. My mother died, and her death set my writing back in ways that Rachel would understand. During those years in Maryland, I lived intimately with Carson’s past. Her still-living friends, Jeanne Davis, Shirley Briggs, and Dorothy Algire became my friends. I spent two summers living along the Sheepscott River in order to sense, to smell, to touch the things Rachel saw and loved. And when at last Rachel Carson: Witness for Nature was finished, my life had been transformed by her courage, her voice, and her vision of the unity of life.
