In 2020, we tend to remember marine biologist Rachel Carson, born this day in 1907, for her highly influential 1962 bestseller, Silent Spring. A painstakingly researched exposé of the chemical industry, the “poison book,” as Carson called it, focused public attention on the ecological consequences of pesticide misuse for the very first time.
Though the book proved controversial and resulted in savage personal attacks on Carson (for everything from her supposed lack of scientific authority to her “mystical attachment to the balance of nature” to her dubious social status as a “spinster”), it was also supremely effective. Not coincidentally, the years immediately following its publication would see a national ban on the pesticide DDT or dichloro-diphenyl-trichloroethane, the establishment of the Environmental Protection Agency, and a burgeoning global ecology movement.
But long before Silent Spring, Carson—a dazzling wordsmith employed for much of her short life by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service—was one of the nation’s best-known nature writers, thanks to her groundbreaking sea trilogy.
A lifelong lover of the ocean (as a child growing up in Pennsylvania, the waters of the world captured her imagination long before she ever glimpsed the Atlantic), Carson published her first book, a study of marine life titled Under the Sea-Wind, more than twenty years before Silent Spring. In 1951, her poetic The Sea Around Us initially appeared as a three-part series in the New Yorker. Essentially a biography of the oceans, the book remained on the New York Times bestseller list for 86 weeks, won a National Book Award, and paved the way for the enthusiastic reception of 1955’s The Edge of the Sea, a study of the ecosystem of the Eastern seaboard.
Carson died of breast cancer in 1964, but her passion for the natural world and her battle for its survival live on in her books, and in the ongoing environmental movement that her words and her work sparked.
To commemorate Carson on her birthday, consider reading (or re-reading) one of her powerhouse classics (Silent Spring, The Sea Around Us, and The Edge of the Sea are all available as eBooks from MI). Or perhaps even more to the point, take yourself outside and enjoy the natural world—an exercise that may be more important now than ever before. As Carson wrote in Silent Spring, “Those who contemplate the beauty of the earth find reserves of strength that will endure as long as life lasts. There is something infinitely healing in the repeated refrains of nature—the assurance that dawn comes after night, and spring after winter.”
