by Krista Reisdorf

As a child, Rachel Carson spent a lot of time in solitude in rural Pennsylvania. As she grew up, she became a shy and reserved woman. She was viewed as being solemn, mild-mannered and more inclined to listen than talk. One would not expect her to be the type of woman who would wage a high-profile war against the chemical industry.

However, that is exactly what Carson did, and she is one of the first people credited with starting the modern environmentalist movement in the U.S., making people more aware of how their actions can negatively affect their surroundings and ultimately endanger the environment and the health of its inhabitants. One of Carson's books, Silent Spring, a look at the hazardous effects of misusing pesticides, became one of the most influential environmental books ever written.

Background

Born May 27, 1907, in Springdale, Pa., Rachel Carson grew up appreciating the outdoors, in large part because of her mother's love for nature. Wanting to be a writer, she attended Pennsylvania College for Women in Pittsburgh and specialized in English composition. She found biology fascinating and switched to that field of study, going to graduate school at Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore.

Carson taught at the Johns Hopkins Summer School for seven years and became a member of the University of Maryland zoology staff in 1931, receiving a master's degree in zoology from Johns Hopkins University in 1932. To help satisfy her interest in marine biology, she performed post-graduate work at the Marine Biological Laboratory, Woods Hole, Mass. In 1936, she took a position as an aquatic biologist with the U.S. Bureau of Fisheries in Washington, D.C.

She wrote articles for the Baltimore Sun, as well as produced pamphlets about conservation and natural resources. She wrote her first book, Under the Sea Wind in 1941, which led to her position as editor-in-chief of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. In 1952, she gained more fame with The Sea Around Us, for which she won numerous awards.

She resigned from her position with the government in 1952 to concentrate on her writing, producing various articles and publishing The Edge of the Sea in 1955. Her writing reflected the view that human beings are only one aspect of nature and are distinguished by their power to change their environment.

Silent Spring

In 1957, Carson's friend Olga Owens Huckins, a resident in Duxbury, Mass., sent her a letter that said an airplane sprayed DDT over her 2 acres of woods, and the next day she found dead songbirds in her yard.

This prompted Carson to tackle a new topic in her most controversial and somewhat apocalyptic book, Silent Spring, which was published in 1962. In Silent Spring, Carson warned the public about the long-term effects of indiscriminately using pesticides, which had become more common after World War II when it was used to help U.S. troops by killing malaria-causing insects.

In the book, Carson details how DDT entered the food chain and accumulated in the fatty tissues of animals (including humans), causing cancer and genetic damage. She explains how a single application of DDT kills even the insects that aren't being targeted and remains toxic in the environment after rainfall. Her position was that DDT and other pesticides were causing irrevocable damage to birds and animals and contaminating the world's food supply. Bemoaning the indiscriminate use of pesticides, she asked people to change the way they viewed nature and reminded them that human beings are subject to the same damage as the rest of nature's creatures.

On April 3, 1963, the television series "C.B.S. Reports" presented "The Silent Spring of Rachel Carson." During the program, Carson said: "It is the public that is being asked to assume the risks that the insect controllers calculate. The public must decide whether it wishes to continue on the present road, and it can do so only when in full possession of the facts.

"We still talk in terms of conquest," she continues. "We still haven't become mature enough to think of ourselves as only a tiny part of a vast and incredible universe. Man's attitude toward nature is today critically important simply because we have now acquired a fateful power to alter and destroy nature. But man is a part of nature, and his war against nature is inevitably a war against himself ... Now, I truly believe, that we in this generation, must come to terms with nature, and I think we're challenged as mankind has never been challenged before to prove our maturity and our mastery—not of nature, but of ourselves."

Carson was labeled an "alarmist" by the chemical industry and some government officials.

"The major claims of Miss Rachel Carson's book, Silent Spring, are gross distortions of the actual facts, completely unsupported by scientific, experimental evidence and general practical experience in the field," said Dr. Robert White-Stevens, a spokesman for the chemical industry. "Her suggestion that pesticides are in fact biocides destroying all life is obviously absurd in the light of the fact that without selective biologicals, these compounds would be completely useless. The real threat, then, to the survival of man is not chemical but biological, in the shape of hordes of insects that can denude our forests, sweep over our crop lands, ravage our food supply and leave in their wake a train of destitution and hunger, conveying to an undernourished population the major diseases scourges of mankind."

However, she was prepared for attacks on the factual value of information in her book. Silent Spring had 55 pages of notes and a list of experts who had read an approved the manuscript. Many people—including distinguished scientists—supported Carson's views, and Carson stood strong in the face of conflict, reiterating the importance of using chemicals intelligently.

"We must have insect control," she said. "I do not favor turning nature over to insects. I favor the sparing, selective and intelligent use of chemicals. It is the indiscriminate blanket spraying that I oppose."

She testified before Congress in 1963 after President John F. Kennedy's Science Advisory Committee took her concerns to heart and released a pesticide report. Although the report maintained that pesticides must be used, it advocated careful use and research into potential health hazards. Carson approved of the recognition and in her testimony said the committee had created a climate that could make creation of a Pesticide Commission possible. Her work did, in fact, lead to the formation of the first grassroots environmental organizations, as well as a federal ban on DDT in 1972.

A legacy

After battling breast cancer for years, Carson died in 1964. Although some of Carson's assertions in Silent Spring are said to be misleading—such as DDT being a carcinogen in humans—her legacy is undeniable. Carson is credited with not only making people aware of the hazards of misusing pesticides but also of raising people's awareness of their environment and prompting them to care enough to protect it.

In 1996, then-Vice President Al Gore wrote an introduction to the Earthwatch section of "24 hours in cyberspace," an online project that was meant to be a digital time capsule of online life and show the effects of the Internet. He included an essay about Carson's contributions to the environmental movement.

"Silent Spring came as a cry in the wilderness, a deeply felt, thoroughly researched, and brilliantly written argument that changed the course of history," he said. "Without this book, the environmental movement might have been long delayed or never have developed at all."

This Web exclusive information is a supplement to The next step.