A Given PLACE

Environmental writer Rachel Carson was born to a poor family in a factory town near Pittsburgh. The smell in her town was so terrible that old people did not sit outside on their porches. Here, she could see old horses walking the covered wooden ramp into the glue factory. Her mother wanted her to escape – she got a scholarship to college believing she would study writing, but she turned to biology instead. Next she earned master’s degree in zoology from John’s Hopkins, but was forced out of the PhD program by the Depression and the need to support her family who fled their town and high debts, and moved to Baltimore to live with Carson (a sick father, mother, her divorced sister and two nieces). She became a science editor for a New Deal agency, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. To make extra money she sold articles to the Baltimore Sun. Her father died shortly after, her sister two years later. She raised her two nieces with her mother’s help and later adopted her grandnephew who was orphaned at four. She never married. She fought breast cancer: a cyst removed in 1946, another in 1950, a radical mastectomy in April 1960, November 1960 lumps on her ribs led radiation treatments. By early 1961 she often used a wheel chair, she continued various treatments, endured many opportunistic infections (she wrote to a friend ‘such a catalog of illnesses!’) In 1962 Silent Spring was published. In 1964 she died. She was 56.

Rachel Carson helped us to wake up, how?

In a New Yorker article March 19,2018, The Right Way to Remember Rachel Carson by Jill Lepore, the author says, “these obligations sometimes frustrated Carson, but not half as much as they frustrate her biographers … (who see) Carson’s family obligations – in particular, the children – are nothing but burdens that ‘deprived her of privacy and drained her physical and emotional energy…’ But caring for other people brings its own knowledge. Carson came to see the world as beautiful, wild, animal, and vulnerable, each part attached to every other part, not only through prodigious scientific research but also through a lifetime of caring for the very old and the very young…the domestic pervades Carson’s understanding of nature. ‘Wildlife, it is pointed out, is dwindling because its home is being destroyed,’ she wrote in 1938, ‘but the home of the wildlife is also our home.’ If she’d had fewer ties, she would have had less insight.” Carson spoke to housewives, tapping in to the world around them

As a girl, Rachel’s love was the sea (though she had never seen it). In a New York Times article September 21, 2012, How ‘Silent Spring’ Ignited the Environmental Movement by Eliza Griswold, the author explains the focus of her first books. “Carson believed that people would protect only what they loved, so she worked to establish a ‘sense of wonder’ about nature. In her best-selling sea books – The Sea Around Us (1951), The Edge of the Sea (1955), and Under the Sea-Wind (1941) – she used simple and sometimes sentimental narratives about the oceans to articulate sophisticated ideas about the inner workings of largely unseen things.” In the New Yorker Lepore, “ ‘My quarrel with almost all seashore books for the amateur,’ she (Carson) reflected, is that they give him a lot of separate little capsules of information about a series of creatures, which are never firmly placed in their environment.’ Carson’s seashore book was different, an explanation of the shore as a system, an ecosystem, a word most readers had never heard before, and one that Carson herself rarely used by instead conjured, as a wave of motion and history…”  For Carson, building a deep foundation helps people see the ‘whole.’ Seeing the ‘whole’ in all its beauty, in all its diversity, flames a sense of wonder that builds to love. Love provides the energy for action.

Mark Hamilton Lytle in his book, The Gentle Subversive: Rachel Carson, Silent Spring, and the Rise of the Environmental Movement explains Carson’s approach, keeping in touch with scientific research, actively engaging scientists as well as aware citizens reporting on a dead bird or squirrel. Her “contacts were essential to the way Rachel approached each new book. As a trained biologist who spent years translating jargon-filled government reports into English, Carson knew how to extract relevant materials from dense data. She did not, however, simply find her subject and consult relevant articles and experts. Rather, she constructed networks of correspondents with whom she raised questions and from whom she sought explanations. That was the strategy she was now employing with Man Against the Earth (a working title for her research toward ‘the poison book’). By 1958 her research files began to expand into what would become a small archive filled with letters and articles from hundreds of sources. Most of her correspondents supported her project. They shared her concerns for protecting the natural environment and appreciated her gift for translating their scientific jargon into language any reader could understand. To guarantee that her translation of their work did not misrepresent their views, she sent relevant passages to them for editing and verification.” Systems scientists studying ecosystems understand the greater the variety in a system, the greater the resilience. And they know that loss of habitat, and loss of species make the ecosystem less healthy. “Her respect for ideas and her ability to convey them gained the confidence of scientists and turned many of them into champions of her books,” Lytle explains.

After Silent Spring was published, Carson was interviewed for an hour by Eric Sevareid on CBS Reports. Two Carson biographers, Linda Lear and William Souder report that Severeid was afraid Carson would not live to see the show broadcast.

According to Griswold in The N.Y. Times, “The personal attacks (by the chemical industry) against Carson were stunning. She was accused of being a communist sympathizer and dismissed as a spinster with an affinity for cats. In one threatening letter to (the books publisher) Houghton Mifflin, Velsicol’s general counsel (makers of DDT) insinuated that there were ‘sinister influences’ in Carson’s work: she was some kind of agricultural propagandist in the employ of the Soviet Union, he implied, and her intention was to reduce Western countries’ ability to produce food, to achieve ‘east-curtain parity.’ …  The well-financed counterreaction to Carson’s book was a prototype for the brand of attack now regularly made.”

Again in The N.Y. Times, Souder suggests that “Carson may have regarded Silent Spring and stewardship of the environment as a unifying issue for humankind, but the result (over the past 50 years) has been an increasingly factionalized arena.”

Rachel Carson’s sense of wholeness and wonder allowed her to write a new kind of book combining science and inspiring wonder for the natural world. In the act of writing, she modeled her deep knowledge ecosystems. Silent Spring imprinted on a society waking up to the feeling that our world, our home is threatened by our actions.