Rachel Carson

    Rachel Louise Carson

     Biologist, writer, ecologist

Born: May 27, 1907

in Springdale, Pennsylvania

Died: April 14, 1964
in Silver Spring, Maryland

After completing her education, Carson joined the U. S. Bureau of Fisheries as the writer of a radio show entitled "Romance Under the Waters," in which she was able to explore life under the seas and bring it to listeners. In 1936, after being the first woman to take and pass the civil service test, the Bureau of Fisheries hired her as a full-time junior biologist, and over the next 15 years, she rose in the ranks until she was the chief editor of all publications for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

During the 1940s, Carson began to write books on her observations of life under the sea, a world as yet unknown to the majority of people. She resigned from her government position in 1952 in order to devote all her time to writing. The idea for her most famous book, Silent Spring, emerged, and she began writing it in 1957. It was published in 1962, and influenced President Kennedy, who had read it, to call for testing of the chemicals mentioned in the book. Carson has been called the mother of the modern environmental movement.

It is difficult to determine definitively what events directly resulted from the publication of Silent Spring, because by 1962 there was an awareness of the negative aspects of DDT and many of the "hard" pesticides by part of the scientific community (Hynes, 1987). DDT, which played a lead role in the book, was already under scrutiny for its ability to accumulate in fatty tissues of animals and, presumably, humans. Perhaps the most enduring effect of the book was to change public perception (Shea, 1973) of the role of pesticides from that of innocuous beneficial tools of man, having negligible costs, to a tool whose benefits may be offset by yet unknown costs. This changed perception was not confined to the United States. Carson's name and book were invoked many times before the House of Lords in England in 1963, resulting in controls on the use of aldrin, dieldrin, and heptachlor (Newsweek, 1964a). The book was published in France, Germany, Italy, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Finland, Holland, Spain, Brazil, Japan, Iceland, Portugal, and Israel and stimulated environmental legislation in all of them.
              http://www.hort.purdue.edu/newcrop/history/lecture31/r_31-3.html