Who was Rachel Carson?
Carson trained as a marine biologist and had a long career at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. The Sea Around Us (1951) won a National Book Award. Her prophetic Silent Spring (1962), about the dangers of pesticides in the food chain, is regarded as the seminal work in the history of the environmental movement.
Rachel Carson was born in 1907 on a farm in Springdale, Pennsylvania. She graduated from what is now Chatham College and then earned a Masters Degree in Marine Biology at Johns Hopkins University. Rachel Carson taught Zoology at the University of Maryland and eventually took a job with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. While working for the government she wrote a number of books that gave her the financial independence to quit her position and begin work on her most famous book. That book, Silent Spring, was published in 1962 and was a major influence in helping people understand the damage pesticides and chemicals are doing to our health and environment. In 1992, a panel of distinguished Americans declared Silent Spring the most influential book of the past 50 years. Sadly, Rachel Carson died in 1964 of a cancer that may have been caused by exposure to the very environmental carcinogens she had been studying…
Selected by the National Women’s History Project to serve as the iconic model for this year’s theme, “Women Taking the Lead to Save Our Planet,” Rachel Carson is often credited with inspiring the modern environmental movement. In 1962, Rachel Carson’s pioneering and meticulously researched expose, Silent Spring, identified the devastating and irrevocable hazards of DDT, one of the most powerful pesticides the world had known. Silent Spring’s publication caused a firestorm of controversy. Some of the attacks were very personal, questioning Carson’s integrity and even her sanity.
