Woman of the Week – Rachel Carson

Rachel Louise Carson was an American marine biologist and conservationist, best known for her book Silent Spring that was controversial but also led the global environmental consciousness movement.

She was born in 1907 near Springdale, Pennsylvania. She spent much of her childhood exploring her family’s 65-acre farm. Nature and the works of Beatrix Potter, Herman Melville and Joseph Conrad creatively inspired her. She graduated high school at the top of her class and later went to the Pennsylvania College for Women (now Chatham University). She started as an English major but later switched to Biology.

She started graduate school at Johns Hopkins in 1929. She also became an assistant in Raymond Pearl’s laboratory. She worked with pit vipers and squirrels and completed her dissertation on the embryonic development in fish. She wanted to pursue a doctorate, but as the Great Depression loomed, she needed to find work to support her family.

Her need to work became more pressing when her father died suddenly, leaving Carson, her sister and her mother alone in 1935. She settled for a temporary positon with the U.S. Bureau of Fisheries, writing copy for radio broadcasts focused on aquatic life. Her interest and skill in this area eventually landed her a job as a junior aquatic biologist. Also in these years, her first book, Under the Sea, was published, based on her pamphlets on conservation and natural resources.

She rose among the ranks, eventually supervising a small writing staff and overseeing publications. By 1950, she had sparked the interest of the Oxford University Press. They were interested in her book idea about a history of the ocean, which became her second book, The Sea Around Us. The book gathered lots of attention and later became a documentary.

Early in 1953, she began field research on geology and organisms along the Atlantic shore. With this work, she completed the third book of her sea trilogy, The Edge of the Sea.

During World War II, she learned and became disturbed by the use of synthetic chemical pesticides. Her conservation work opened her eyes to the use of the chemicals and their adverse effect on the environment.

She brought these concerns to light with her most notable work, Silent Spring. Her book accessed the chemical industry of spreading false information to the public and said public officials accepted their word as truth. It was met with fierce opposition when it was released in 1962. But despite the anger, it spurred a ban of DDT for agricultural use and inspired an awareness movement that later helped launch the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

DDT, or Dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane, was used to control malaria and typhus among civilians and troops during the war by killing the bugs that may carry the diseases. However, due to Carson’s book, the uncontrolled use of the chemical was seen less as a way to control those diseases and more of a harm to people and plants. It did kill the bugs that carry the disease, but it also killed everything else like plants and insects that help the environment and public health. Exposure to humans can also cause infertility, endocrine harm and hurt the thyroid when exposed over a prolonged period.

To this day, her book is known as one of the most influential science writings as it brought about change and helped many people from feeling the effects of prolonged exposure.

Carson died in 1964 after a long battle with breast cancer, just a year after testifying before Congress about her work and the need to protect human health.