FREE ESSAY ON RACHEL CARSON THROUGH THE YEARS

RACHEL CARSON THROUGH THE YEARS

Rachel Carson
Rachel Carson is considered one of America's finest science and nature writers. She is
best known for her 1962 book, Silent Spring, which is often credited with beginning the
environmental movement in the United States. The book focussed on the uncontrolled and
often indiscriminate use of pesticides, especially dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane
(commonly known as DDT), and the irreparable environmental damage caused by these
chemicals. The public outcry Carson generated by the book motivated the U.S. Senate to
form a committee to
investigate pesticide use. Her eloquent testimony before the committee altered the views
of many government officials and helped lead to the
creation of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). 
Rachel Louise Carson, the youngest of three children, was born on May 27, 1907, in
Springdale, Pennsylvania, a small town twenty miles north of Pittsburgh. Her parents,
Robert Warden and Maria McLean Carson, lived on sixty-five acres and kept cows, chickens,
and horses. Although the land was not a true working farm, it had plenty of woods,
animals, and streams, and here, near the shores of the Allegheny River, Carsonlearned
about the interrelationship between the land and animals. 
Carson's mother was the daughter of a Presbyterian minister, and she instilled in her a
love of nature and taught her the intricacies of music, art, and literature. Carson's
early life was one of isolation; she had few friends besides her cats, and she spent most
of her time reading and pursuing the study of nature. She began writing poetry at age
eight and published her first story, A Battle in the Clouds, in St. Nicholas magazine at
the age of ten. She later claimed that her professional writing career began at age
eleven, when St. Nicholas paid her a little over three dollars for one of her essays. 
Carson planned to pursue a career as a writer when she received a four-year scholarship
in 1925 from the Pennsylvania College for Women, now Chatham College, in Pittsburgh. Here
she fell under the influence of Mary Scott Skinker, whose freshman biology course altered
her career plans. In the middle of her junior year, Carson switched her major from
English to zoology, and in 1928 she graduated magnum cum laude.Biology has given me
something to write about, she wrote to a friend, as quoted in Carnegie magazine. I will
try in my writing to make animals in the woods or waters, where they live, as alive to
others as they are to me. 
With Skinker's help, Carson obtained first a summer fellowship at the Marine Biology
Laboratory at Woods Hole in Massachusetts and then a one-year scholarship from the Johns
Hopkins University in Baltimore. While at Woods Hole over the summer, she saw the ocean
for the first time and encountered her first exotic sea creatures, including sea anemones
and sea urchins. At Johns Hopkins, she studied zoology and genetics. Graduate school did
not proceed smoothly; she encountered financial problems and experimental difficulties
but eventually managed to finish her highly detailed master's dissertation, The
Development of the Pronephoros during the Embryonic and Early Larval Life of the Catfish.
In June 1932, she received her master's degree. 
Carson was entering the job market at the height of the Great Depression. Her parents
sold their Pennsylvania home and moved to Maryland to ease some of her financial burdens.
She taught zoology at Johns Hopkins during the summers and on a part-time basis at the
University of Maryland during the regular school year. While she loved teaching, the
meager salaries she earned were barely enough to sustain herself, and, in 1935, her
financial situation became even more desperate when her father died unexpectedly, leaving
her solely responsible for supporting her fragile mother. 
Before beginning her graduate studies at Johns Hopkins, Carson had arranged an interview
with Elmer Higgins, who was head of the Division of Scientific Inquiry at the U.S. Bureau
of Fisheries. Carson wanted to discuss her job prospects in marine biology, and Higgins
had been encouraging, though he then had little to offer. Carson contacted Higgins again
at this time, and she discovered that he had an opening at the Bureau of Fisheries for a
part-time science writer to work on radio scripts. The only obstacle was the civil
service exam, which women were then discouraged from taking. Carson not only did well on
the test, she outscored all other applicants. She went on to become only the second woman
ever hired by the bureau for a permanent professional post. 
At the Bureau of Fisheries, Carson wrote and edited a variety of government publications
everything from pamphlets on how to cook toprofessional scientific journals. She earned a
reputation as a ruthless editor who would not tolerate inconsistencies, weak prose, or
ambiguity. One of her early radio scripts was rejected by Higgins because he found it too
literary. He suggested that she submit the script in essay form to the Atlantic Monthly,
then one of the nation's premier literary magazines. To Carson's amazement, the article
was accepted and published as Undersea in 1937. Her jubilation over the article was
tempered by personal family tragedy. Her older sister, Marian, died at age forty that
same year, and Carson had to assume responsibility for Marian's children, Marjorie and
Virginia Williams. 
The Atlantic Monthly article attracted the notice of an editor at the publishing house of
Simon & Schuster, who urged Carson to expand the four-page essay into book form. Working
diligently in the evenings, she was able to complete the book in a few years; it was
published as Under the Sea-Wind. Unfortunately, the book appeared in print in 1941, just
one month before the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. Despite favorable, even laudatory
reviews, it sold fewer than 1,600 copies after six years in print. It did, however, bring
Carson to the attention of a
number of key people, including the influential science writer William Beebe. Beebe
published an excerpt from Under the Sea-Wind in his 1944 compilation The Book of
Naturalists, including Carson's work alongside the writings of Aristotle, Audubon, and
Thoreau. 
The poor sales of Under the Sea-Wind made Carson concentrate on her government job. The
Bureau of Fisheries merged with the Biological Survey in 1940 and was reborn as the Fish
and Wildlife Service. Carson quickly moved up the professional ranks, eventually reaching
the position of biologist and chief editor after World War II. One of her postwar
assignments, a booklet about National Wildlife Refuges called Conservation in Action,
took her back into the field. As part of her research, she visited the Florida
Everglades, Parker River in Massachusetts, and Chincoteague Islands in the Chesapeake
Bay. 
After the war, Carson began work on a new book that focussed on oceanography. She was now
at liberty to use previously classified government research data on oceanography, which
included a number of technical and scientific breakthroughs. As part of her research, she
did some undersea diving off the Florida during the summer of 1949. She battled skeptical
administrators to arrange a deep-sea cruise to Georges Bank near Nova Scotia aboard the
Fish and Wildlifw Service's research vessel, the Albatross III. 
Entitled The Sea around Us, her book on oceanography was published on July 2, 1951. It
was an unexpected success; abridged in Reader's Digest, it was a Book-of-the-Month Club
alternative selection and it remained on the New York Times bestseller list for
eighty-six weeks. The book brought Carson numerous awards, including the National Book
Award and the John Burroughs Medal, as well as honorary doctorates from her alma mater
and Oberlin College. Despite her inherent shyness, Carsonbecame a regular on the lecture
circuit. Money was no longer the overarching concern it had been; she retired from
government service and devoted her time to writing. 
Freed from financial burdens, Carson began work on another book, focussing this time on
the intricacies of life along the shoreline. She took excursions to the mangrovecoasts of
Florida and returned to one of her favorite locations, the rockyshores of Maine. She fell
in love with the Maine coast, and in 1953 bought a summer home in West Southport on the
shore of Sheepscot Bay. The Edge of the Sea appeared in 1955 and earned Carson two more
prestigious awards, the Achievement Award of the American Association of University Women
and a citation from the National Council of Women of the United States. The book remained
on the bestseller list for twenty weeks, and RKO Studios bought the
rights to it. In typical Hollywood fashion, the studio sensationalized the material and
ignored scientific fact. Carson corrected some of the more egregious errors but still
found the film embarrassing, even after it won an Oscar as the best full-length
documentary of 1953. 
From 1955 to 1957, Carson concentrated on smaller projects, including a telescript,
Something about the Sky, for the Omnibus series. She also contributed a number of
articles to popular magazines. In July 1956, Carson published Help Your Child to Wonder
in the Woman's Home Companion. The article was based on her own real-life experiences,
something rare for Carson. She intended to expand the article into a book and retell the
story of her early life on her parent's Pennsylvania farm. After her death, the essay
reappeared in 1965 as the book The Sense of Wonder. 
In 1956, one of the nieces Carson had raised died at age 36. Marjorie left her son Roger;
Carson now had to care for him in addition to her arthritic mother, who was now
eighty-eight. She legally adopted Roger that same year and began looking for a suitable
place to rear the child. She built a new winter home in Silver Spring, Maryland, on an
uncultivated tract of land, and she began another project shortly after the home was
finished. The luxuriant setting inspired her to turn her thoughts to nature once again.
Carson's next book grew out of a long-held concern about the overuse of pesticides. She
had received a letter from Olga Owens Huckins, who related how the aerial spraying of DDT
had destroyed her Massachusetts bird sanctuary. Huckins asked her to petition federal
authorities to investigate the widespread use of such pesticides, but Carsonthought the
most effective tactic would be to write an article for a popular magazine. When her
initial queries were rejected, Carson attempted to interest the well-known essayist E. B.
White in the subject. White suggested she write the article herself, in her own style,
and he told her to contact William Shawn, an editor at the New Yorker. Eventually, after
numerous discussions with Shawn and others, she decided to write a book instead. 
The international reputation Carson now enjoyed enabled her to enlist the aid of an array
of experts. She consulted with biologists, chemists, entomologists, and pathologists,
spending four years gathering data for her book. When Silent Spring first appeared in
serial form in the New Yorker in June 1962, it drew an aggressive response from the
chemical industry. Carson argued that the environmental consequences of pesticide use
underscored the futility of humanity's attempts to control nature, and she maintained
that these efforts to assume control had upset nature's delicate balance. Although the
message is now largely uncontroversial, the book caused near panic in some circles,
challenging the long-held belief that humans could master nature. The chemical companies,
in particular, attacked both the book and its author; they questioned the data, the
interpretation of the data, and the author's scientific credentials. One early reviewer
referred to Carsonas a hysterical woman, and others continued this sexist line of attack.
Some chemical companies attempted to pressure Houghton Mifflin, the book's publisher,
into suppressing the book, but these attempts failed. 
The general reviews were much kinder and Silent Spring soon attracted a large, concerned
audience, both in America and abroad. A special CBS television broadcast, The Silent
Spring of Rachel Carson, which aired on April 3, 1963, pitted Carson against a chemical
company spokesman. Her cool-headed, commonsensical approach won her many fans and brought
national attention to the problem of pesticide use. The book became a cultural icon and
part of everyday household conversation. Carson received hundreds of invitations to
speak, most of which she declined due to her deteriorating health. She did find the
strength to appear before the Women's National Press Club, the National
Parks Association, and the Ribicoff Committeethe U.S. Senate committee on environmental
hazards. 
In 1963 Carson received numerous honors and awards, including an award from the Izaak
Walton League of America, the Audubon Medal, and the Cullen Medal of the American
Geographical Society. That same year, she was elected to the prestigious American Academy
of Arts and Sciences. She died of heart failure on April 14, 1964, at the age of
fifty-six. In 1980, President Jimmy Carter posthumously awarded her the President's Medal
of Freedom. A Rachel Carson stamp was issued by the U.S. Postal Service in 1981.