RACHEL CARSON


Yesterday, the birthday of one of America’s pioneering environmental activists, and greatest nature writers, slipped by most of us with little or no fanfare. She was the “canary in the coalmine”, sounding the alarm about the damage chemical pesticides were doing, not only to the environment, but to ourselves.

Rachel Carson, author of “Silent Spring”, was born May 27th, 1907, in the Allegheny Valley town of Springdale, Pa. She graduated Magna Cum Laude in 1929 with a degree in zoology from Pennsylvania College for Women. She would later win her masters degree in zoology from John Hopkins. She worked for the government at the Bureau of Fisheries, and later would become the chief editor of publications for the Fish and Wildlife Service, all the while writing articles and stories for various publications.

Success allowed Ms. Carson to retire from government service in 1952 to pursue her writing full time.

In 1958, she received a letter from Olga Huckins of Duxbury, Massachusetts, expressing concern over the spraying of pesticides over a private bird sanctuary in Cape Cod. Alarmed, she decided to investigate. As she battled breast cancer, it took her four years to research and write “Silent Spring”, which explained in eloquent writing how life forms are inter-related, and how poisons used to kill insects seep through the food chain to contaminate higher animals, including us.

Of course, industry, the agriculture department, and the more cautious in the media, all staid defenders of the status quo, rallied to viciously attack the dying Rachel Carson. Time magazine called the book, “an emotional outburst” and called her an “hysterical woman”; particularly ironic since now they’ve named her one of the Worlds 100 Most Influential People of the 20th Century.

Worried that she was an alarmist, Reader’s Digest canceled a contract to condense “Silent Spring”, and Chemical World News called it “science fiction”. One member of the Federal Pest Control Board derided Ms. Carson by saying,”I thought she was a spinster. What’s she so worried about genetics for?”

Despite the predicable reaction of corporate America, who always worries about environmental visionaries and their effect on profits, “Silent Spring” became a runaway best seller, with international reverberations. Rachel Carson testified before Congress in 1963, calling for new policies to protect human health and the environment.

When she succumbed to cancer in 1964, scientists were just discovering how DDT damaged the eggshells of nesting birds, and finding the toxin in human milk. Jimmy Carter posthumously awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1980.

There is still a lot of work to do, but brave people like Rachel Carson, and others, have helped us to avoid, (so far) the potential spring that she so powerfully described.

“It was a spring without voices. On the mornings that had once throbbed with the dawn chorus of scores of bird voices there was now no sound; only silence lay over the fields and woods and marsh."