On September 27, 1962, Silent Spring, the inestimably important environmentalism work from Rachel Carson, was published in the United States. Many of us have heard of both Silent Spring and Rachel Carson in history class when studying the beginnings of environmentalism in America, but beyond factoids few dive deeper into who she was, and exactly how important this book was in changing the tide of environmental regulation in this country.
Rachel Carson was interested in nature, and specifically the oceans, since she was a young girl. She grew up in rural Pennsylvania and spent her childhood reading, finding herself most enamored of books about the sea including Moby Dick and Treasure Island. She attended college to study biology, and supported herself by working in a lab. She ended up working for the U.S. Bureau of Fisheries writing weekly radio shows meant to inspire regular Americans to celebrate and utilize their vast aquatic resources. This assignment blossomed into further work for the Bureau and Carson rose through the ranks, eventually taking on the role of Chief Editor for all publications.
When not writing pamphlets and brochures for the Bureau, Carson worked on her own literary pursuits. She published her first book, Under the Sea Wind, in 1941. It described the lives of fish and birds, but through vignettes rather than cold scientific description. Over the next decade she grew to become a more well known writer, especially among those interested in the natural world. Her articles were published in The New Yorker and Reader’s Digest, and her 1951 book The Sea Around Us received the National Book Award for Nonfiction.
Through her research for both her day job and her books and articles, Carson followed the development of a new chemical pesticide known as DDT. DDT was known for being extremely effective at eradicating insect populations, and by the 1950’s was in widespread use around the United States and the World. Carson began to focus more on DDT and decided to make her next book about the pesticide and its effect on local ecologies and the humans exposed to it. The resulting work, Silent Spring, became a rallying point for environmentalists concerned with overzealous use of not just DDT, but many harmful chemicals.
Silent Spring didn’t present any new research or groundbreaking studies. Rather, it was the cogent synthesis of previous work on the topic, as well as Carson’s stellar reputation as a nature writer that made the book as effective as it was at inspiring public action. Carson, now the popular expert on the issue, was invited to testify before the President’s Science Advisory Committee. Environmental policy through the 1970’s, which included the formation and early work of the Environmental Protection Agency, was centered around the topics that Carson described in the book.
It is likely that Rachel Carson would have continued to be a strong voice in the environmentalism movement, but she had been fighting cancer throughout the writing of Silent Spring and succumbed to the disease two years after its publication in 1964. While her name and her influential work have become trivia in American history, it is important with this topic, and any other, to take a deeper look and understand who these people were and why they were fighting for their causes. Rachel Carson, from the time she was a child, loved nature and the seas, and she saw rampant chemical use destroying what she cared about. In the way she knew how, she fought back on behalf of nature, and the resulting actions have changed the course of recent history.
