64 THE SCIENTIST | the-scientist.com
FOUNDATIONSBY SHAWNA WILLIAMST
he sea, Rachel Carson once wrote,
is the “great mother of life.” Most
know Carson for Silent Spring, an
environmental manifesto that accused
the chemical industry of spreading
disinformation on pesticides. The book,
published in 1962, contributed to the
initiation of a federal ban on the use of
the synthetic organic compound DDT, and
to the creation of the US Environmental
Protection Agency. But long before
Carson’s carefully crafted prose helped
to push the environmental movement
forward, she introduced readers to the
wonders of the sea.
To write Under the Sea-Wind, her
first book, Carson lay on the beaches of
Beaufort, North Carolina, and “felt the
waves, listened to the birds, and imagined
what was going on,” says Robert Musil, the
president and CEO of the Rachel Carson
Council, the legacy organization Carson
envisioned before her death to carry on
her environmental advocacy work. “She
walked around at night with a flashlight
and looked at the ghost crabs and became
deeply involved with these creatures.” In the
book, Carson follows a few of the animals—a
mackerel, a pair of small shorebirds, and an
eel—in their salty worlds.
For him, Musil says, the enduring appeal
of Carson’s writing comes from her insight
that “if you can’t identify with something,
somebody, a species, or a people who are
different than yourself, you’re inclined to
destroy it.”
This ethic of environmental empathy
was first instilled in Carson as she grew
up outside of Pittsburgh, learning from
her mother to listen to and identify the
songs of birds and appreciate the wonder
of the natural world. Carson made her first
foray into writing at age eight with a story
about two wrens searching for a house.
She later enrolled at Pennsylvania College
for Women, now Chatham University, to
study English. A biology course taught by
Mary Scott Skinker led Carson to a summerresearch position at the Woods Hole Marine
Biological Laboratory, where she combed
the shore during the d ay, and at night peered
into the water to watch what came to life
under the moonlight.
Carson went on study zoology at Johns
Hopkins University, where she wrote a
thesis on the development of a type of
tissue that helps days-old fish embryos
excrete waste, completing her master’s
degree in 1932. She started her PhD in
marine biology at Hopkins but left the
program to take a job at the Washington,
DC, office of the Bureau of Fisheries, now
the US Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS),
to support herself and her family during
the Depression. She continued to write,
first selling articles to The Baltimore
Sun, and eventually submitting an essay
to The Atlantic. After it was published,
she began using her evenings to work on
Under the Sea-Wind.Published in November of 1941, the
book was critically acclaimed, but because
of the outbreak of World War II, it didn’t
sell well. Drawing on her fish embryo
research and her experience as an aquatic
biologist and science writer at the FWS,
Carson pitched a story on the detrimental
effects of pesticides to Reader’s Digest,
but it wasn’t accepted. Undeterred, she
started on her second book, The Sea
Around Us, which became an instant
best seller, winning the National Book
Award for nonfiction writing in 1952.
Subsequently, Carson’s first book was
republished and also became a best seller,
as did the next book she wrote, The Edge
of the Sea.
Ultimately, Carson did get her
warnings about pesticides into print. And
Musil says that the success of her first
three books is part of the reason that Silent
Spring had the impact that it did.gPoet of the Sea, 1940s–1950s
,
is the “great mother of life.” Most
, an
environmental manifesto that accused
the chemical industry of spreading
disinformation on pesticides. The book,
published in 1962, contributed to the
initiation of a federal ban on the use of
the synthetic organic compound DDT, and
to the creation of the US Environmental
Protection Agency. But long before
Carson’s carefully crafted prose helped
to push the environmental movement
forward, she introduced readers to the, her
first book, Carson lay on the beaches of
Beaufort, North Carolina, and “felt the
waves, listened to the birds, and imagined
what was going on,” says Robert Musil, the
president and CEO of the Rachel Carson
Council, the legacy organization Carson
envisioned before her death to carry onCOURTESY OF RACHEL CARSON COUNCIL, REX GARY SCHMIDTTIDAL PROSPECTING: Rachel Carson with Bob Hines, an artist who illustrated The Edge of the Sea,
collecting specimens from the surf in the Florida Keys in 1955.