CARSON, Rachel Louise

(b. 27 May 1907 in Springdale, Pennsylvania; d. 14 April 1964 in Silver Spring, Maryland), scientist and writer whose book Silent Spring (1962) activated public concern over the use of pesticides and inspired a new environmental consciousness in the 1960s.

Carson was the youngest of three children born to Robert Carson and Maria McLean. Her father purchased their home, a farm, with plans to subdivide and sell, but made few sales over the years. Instead he worked as a traveling salesman, electrician, and a utility-company employee, among other jobs, and the family often struggled for enough money to survive. Her mother was a thirty-eight-year-old homemaker with two children already in school when Carson was born. McLean had a keen interest in nature and a love of reading that she shared with her youngest daughter. She and Carson were inseparable, spending endless hours wandering the outdoors. On one of these walks, Carson discovered a fossilized fish in the cliffs near her home, sparking a special interest in scientific discovery.

From her youngest years, Carson pursued writing. Her first story was published in the September 1918 issue of St. Nicholas, a popular children's literary magazine. A shy, slim, introverted girl, Carson was an excellent student and was accepted on partial scholarship to Pittsburgh's Pennsylvania College for Women (later Chatham College). Carson began college as an English major, but under the influence of Mary Scott Skinker, who taught her in a biology class and became her mentor and friend, she switched to science in her third year. After graduating on 10 June 1929 Carson left for a summer internship at the Marine Biology Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. Enamored with the sea, she continued her studies at Woods Hole during the summers and completed her master's degree in zoology at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.

Throughout her life, Carson experienced demanding familial obligations. As a college student, she cared for nieces and nephews in her crowded family home during the summer. Family responsibilities prevented her from pursuing a doctorate, and as she began to make a living, she provided a home for her parents and at times her siblings and their offspring.

Carson taught zoology at the University of Maryland for a few years, before beginning a fifteen-year career as a scientist and editor for the U.S. government in 1936. She became the first female biologist ever hired by the U.S. Bureau of Fisheries. Her final government position was as editor-in-chief at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

While earning her living as a government employee, Carson began submitting nature articles for publication. In time, she completed two books about the sea: Under the Sea-Wind (1941) and The Sea Around Us (1952). Writings from her second book had been rejected by fifteen magazines, but once it was published, the work became hugely popular and stayed on the best-seller lists for eighty-six weeks. Not only did the book earn Carson national prominence as a naturalist and writer, it also allowed her to leave her job, devote all her time to writing, and buy a summer home in Maine. Carson, whose writing was praised for its clarity and elegance of style, completed her trilogy of sea books with The Edge of the Sea in 1955.

Carson tended to her sister, niece, and mother during their failing health and subsequent deaths, and adopted her grandnephew Roger when her niece died. Thus at age forty-eight, she became mother to a five-year-old boy. In 1957 local and state governments sprayed a combination of fuel oil and the insecticide DDT over portions of the northeastern United States. Carson had friends in Massachusetts and Long Island who witnessed the wildlife damage that resulted, and she was persuaded to write an article in protest. She had considered writing on the subject as early as 1945, even suggesting such an article to Reader's Digest, whose editors failed to show interest. But by 1958 Carson felt compelled to change directions in her writing, and to begin researching the effects of pesticides on wildlife as the subject of her next book. "The more I learned about the use of pesticides, the more appalled I became," she later said. "I realized that here was the material for a book. What I discovered was that everything which meant most to me as a naturalist was being threatened, and that nothing I could do would be more important."

In the 1950s and early 1960s, Americans generally embraced pesticides and chemicals as boons to human civilization, believing them responsible for increased agricultural production and for easing the nuisance and destruction from uncontrolled insects. And in light of the cold war and the rush to win the "space race" against the Soviets, technological advancements by the United States were seen as patriotic. For these reasons, the publication of Carson's Silent Spring in 1962 was highly controversial. Knowing criticism was inevitable, Carson was meticulous in her research, calling upon her extensive contacts in government, academia, and conservation groups for accurate data, and devoting a fifty-five-page appendix to her principal sources.

Portions of Silent Spring first appeared in the New Yorker in June 1962. Carson used the title to bring up images of a world absent of birds as a result of chemical poisoning. Even before the book was published, chemical companies threatened lawsuits and began attacking Carson rather than her facts. When the book was released on 27 September 1962, the National Agricultural Chemicals Association spent over $250,000 on a public-relations campaign to discredit Carson. They painted her as an alarmist and a hysterical female. A letter from former Secretary of Agriculture Ezra Taft Benson to President Dwight D. Eisenhower, in which he expressed the opinion that Carson might be a Communist, and questioned why "a spinster with no children" would be so concerned about genetics, was widely quoted.

But Silent Spring was a runaway best-seller, and sales were probably helped by the criticism it attracted. The book spoke of the connection between cancer and pesticides, raising issues of public health. President John F. Kennedy's interior secretary Stewart Udall took an early interest in the book, and used it to advocate pesticide regulation within the government. A shift in the public attitude toward the environment was meanwhile taking place. As Carson stated in a speech to the National Parks Association, the public no longer "assumed that someone was looking after things—that the spraying must be all right or it wouldn't be done."

Two days before Carson appeared on the Columbia Broadcasting System's CBS Reports in April 1963, three of the five largest commercial sponsors withdrew their advertising. Nevertheless, the network broadcast the show and Carson came across as dignified, calm, polite, and concerned, thus easily vindicating herself from personal attacks. On 15 May 1963 President Kennedy's Science Advisory Committee released the report "The Uses of Pesticides," which formalized support for Carson's findings. During her June 1963 testimony before the Senate Commerce Committee, chaired by Senator Abraham Ribicoff of Connecticut, Carson provided ideas for reform, and called for the formation of an independent board or commission within the executive branch of government.Vice President Al Gore later credited Carson with inspiring the formation of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), as well as leading himself and millions of others to an environmental consciousness.

At the time of her death, only Carson's closest friends were aware of the tremendous pain and physical strain she had faced in her last few years. Carson had been battling cancer throughout the writing of Silent Spring. She never publicly suggested a link between her cancer and an agricultural-research facility near her home, but privately she suspected it. Carson died from a coronary heart attack. She had requested cremation, and that her ashes be scattered off the coast of Maine near her home, but against her wishes, her brother Robert held a large funeral for her at the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C. Later, her friends observed her original request.

Considered one of the most influential books of the twentieth century, Silent Spring had far-reaching effects. At a time when the American public began questioning the government's decision to fight the Vietnam War, they also began rethinking the human relationship to nature. Because of Carson, words such as "ecology" and "environment" entered the public vocabulary. No one could have predicted the impact that one woman, described by naturalist Louis Halle as "quiet, diffident, neat, proper and without affectation," could have on society. Carson herself did not live long enough to observe the impact of her book. After she completed writing Silent Spring she wrote in a letter: "I have felt bound by a solemn obligation to do what I could—if I didn't at least try I could never again be happy in nature. But now I can believe I have at least helped a little. It would be unrealistic to believe one book could bring a complete change."

Carson's personal papers are at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. Two significant biographies are Paul Brooks, The House of Life: Rachel Carson at Work (1972), and Linda Lear, Rachel Carson: Witness for Nature (1997). Martha Freeman, ed., Always, Rachel (1995), offers an intimate view of Carson through the letters she exchanged with her friend Dorothy Freeman. Peter Matthiessen wrote a good brief biography for Time magazine's "100 People of the Century" issue (29 Mar. 1999), and Stewart Udall, one of the first politicians to become interested in Carson's work, discussed her in "How the Wilderness Was Won," American Heritage (Feb.–Mar. 2000). The Web site http://www.rachelcarson.org is also a good source for information.

Janet Ingram