Although Springdale was a hardscrabble town known for its glue factory, drab streets, and blue-collar workers. Maria filled Rachel’s childhood with the wonders of nature. Walking hand in hand through the nearby woods, orchards, and fields, or strolling along the banks of the Allegheny River, Maria described in vivid detail the wealth of life around them. So devoted was Maria to her youngest child that, with the exception of a few years in college, she never left her side. More than anything else, Maria encouraged Rachel to write.
In 1922, when she was 15 years old, Rachel wrote an article for St. Nicholas magazine that offered a glimpse into her future. Accompanied by her dog, Pal, Carson described woods where the “majestic silence [was] interrupted only by the rustling breeze, and the cheery, ‘witch, witchery’ of the Maryland yellow throat.” She lovingly described the music of orioles, bobwhites, cuckoos, and hummingbirds, and a nest “containing four jewel-like eggs.” Carson had found a utopia far from the grimy streets of Springdale. Another world. An Eden. A place where she could immerse herself in the intricacies of nature. A place where the man-made stench of Springdale’s glue factory had faded into the distance.
—
AFTER GRADUATING from high school in 1925, Carson attended the Pennsylvania College for Women (now Chatham College) in Pittsburgh. Maria visited her almost every weekend. Although Carson entered as an English major, she fell in love with science, taking courses in botany, zoology, histology, microbiology, and embryology. In 1929, she graduated magna cum laude. That summer, Rachel earned a scholarship to the prestigious Marine Biological Laboratory at Woods Hole, Massachusetts. Here, she fell in love with the sea. Encountering young mullet fish at night, she wrote, “I stood knee deep in that racing water, and could barely see those darting silver bits of life for my tears. That was when I first began to let my imagination go down under the water.”
In the fall of 1929, Carson attended Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, determined to earn a Ph.D. degree. It wasn’t to be. Although Rachel submitted a thesis for her master’s degree in 1932—about kidney development in catfish—her professors didn’t believe she had what it took to be a scientist. Abandoned by her mentors, she never performed another scientific experiment—and never received her Ph.D.
During the next few years, Carson contributed articles to the Baltimore Sun and the Richmond Times about tuna fishing off Nova Scotia, oyster farming in the Chesapeake Bay, starlings overwintering in Baltimore, and eels migrating to the Sargasso Sea. She also wrote about how certain species were becoming dangerously depleted, like elk, heath hens, salmon, shad, canvasback ducks, pronghorn antelope, mountain goats, moose, and bears. Carson’s writing had taken a darker turn, now focusing almost exclusively on scarcity and extinction.
In 1935, Rachel Carson dropped out of Johns Hopkins to work as a field aide for the U.S. Bureau of Fisheries in College Park, Maryland. Her job was to write pamphlets and press releases. The following year, she was appointed to a full-time position at the bureau as a junior aquatic biologist. There, she wrote short scripts for a radio program called “Romance Under the Waters.” Two years later, she burst onto the American scene.
In September 1937, Carson published an article in the Atlantic Monthly titled “Undersea.” “The conquest of Mt. Everest has passed into history,” she wrote. “But although the flags of explorers have waved on the highest peaks of the world and fluttered on the frozen rims of the continents, a vast unknown remains: the world of waters.” Inspired by Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, she continued: “The ocean is a place of paradoxes. It is the home of the great white shark, 2,000-pound killer of the seas, and the 100-foot blue whale, the largest animal that ever lived. It is also home of living things so small that your two hands might scoop up as many of them as there are stars in the Milky Way.” Carson signed it “R. L. Carson,” certain that no one would read a scientific article if they knew a woman had written it.
Editors from Simon & Schuster read “Undersea” and loved it. They wanted Carson to write a book. On November 1, 1941, Rachel Carson published Under the Sea-Wind, this time using her full name. Although written for adults, the book had a childlike sense of wonder. Under the Sea-Wind told the story of Silverbar, a sanderling that migrated from the Arctic Circle to Argentina; Scomber, a mackerel that traveled from New England to the continental shelf; and Anguilla, an American eel that journeyed to the Sargasso Sea, joining thousands of other eels that had come to spawn. “There is poetry here,” said one reviewer.
More reviews followed. The New York Times called it “a beautiful and unusual book; a breathtaking canvas of the fierce struggle for life.” The New Yorker, Christian Science Monitor, New York Herald Tribune, and New York Times Book Review also sang its praises, unequivocally. But the timing wasn’t right. One month later, the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor and Americans turned their attention to war. By June 1942, fewer than 1,200 books had been sold; Carson’s royalties amounted to $689.17. “The world received the book with superb indifference,” she lamented.
Carson didn’t blame World War II for poor sales. She blamed her publicists at Simon & Schuster, whom she believed had failed to adequately promote her book. She asked out of her contract, never publishing with them again. Despite this personal setback, Carson’s stock at the Bureau of Fisheries, which was now called the Fisheries and Wildlife Service, continued to rise. By 1949 she was editor in chief of all scientific publications.
—
ON JULY 2, 1951, Oxford University Press published Carson’s second book, The Sea Around Us. One month before publication, excerpts were printed in the New Yorker. The response was overwhelming; more letters were written to the magazine than at any time in its history. Carson became an instant celebrity. Even Walter Winchell, the acerbic radio pundit, commented on how much he was looking forward to reading Carson’s new book.
The opening of The Sea Around Us read like the beginning of Genesis: “Imagine a whole continent of naked rock, across which no covering mantle of green had been drawn…Imagine a land of stone, a silent land, except for the sounds of the rains and winds that swept across it. For there was no living voice and nothing moved over its surface except the shadows of the clouds.”
The New York Herald Tribune called The Sea Around Us “one of the most beautiful books of our time.” Teddy Roosevelt’s daughter said it was the best thing she’d ever read. Three weeks after publication, The Sea Around Us was #5 on the New York Times best-seller list behind only Thor Heyerdahl’s Kon-Tiki, Herman Wouk’s Caine Mutiny, James Jones’s From Here to Eternity, and J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye. In September, The Sea Around Us was #1, where it stayed for 39 weeks—a record. By November, 100,000 copies had been sold, by March, 200,000. The Book-of-the-Month Club selected it and Reader’s Digest condensed it. Four thousand copies were selling every week. When the dust settled, The Sea Around Us had sold more than 1.3 million copies and had been translated into 32 languages.
Then Hollywood stepped in, making The Sea Around Us into a movie. Directed by the “master of disaster,” Irwin Allen—best known for movies and TV series such as The Towering Inferno, The Poseidon Adventure, The Swarm, Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, and Lost in Space—The Sea Around Us won an Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature. Carson hated the movie. And hated all the tinsel and cardboard publicity that came with it. When Jacques Cousteau offered to take her on a voyage on his Calypso, she refused.
Despite Carson’s disdain for the spotlight, the awards and recognitions kept coming, including the National Book Award, arguably the single most coveted book prize in the United States. Editors of the nation’s leading newspapers voted Carson “Woman of the Year.”
Fortune followed fame. Before The Sea Around Us was published, Oxford University Press gave Carson a $1,000 advance. Later, she collected $7,200 from the New Yorker for its serialization, $10,000 from Reader’s Digest for its condensation, $20,000 in royalties for continued sales, and another $20,000 from RKO fo
r the movie rights, all of which added up to more than four times her annual salary. Financially secure, Carson quit her job at the Fisheries and Wildlife Service to devote herself full-time to writing. Despite the enormous financial success of The Sea Around Us, Carson still wasn’t satisfied, believing that Oxford—which had taken out full-page ads in the New York Times, New York Herald Tribune, and Chicago Tribune—hadn’t done enough to promote her book.
Rachel Carson’s fame, sadly, would be short-lived. During the writing of The Sea Around Us, when she was 43 years old, Carson had two small lumps removed from her breast. The pathologist labeled them benign—a diagnosis that would later be called into question.
—
IN OCTOBER 1955, Rachel Carson published her next book, The Edge of the Sea, a tour guide for the casual adventurer. Again the New Yorker serialized it; the critics praised it, (“Carson has done it again in this wise and wonderful book”); the public bought it (more than 70,000 copies sold as it rocketed to #4 on the New York Times best-seller list); and Carson lamented it, claiming that Houghton Mifflin—the next up in her string of publishers—hadn’t adequately promoted it even though they had spent more than $20,000 on advertising.
Although she didn’t have a Ph.D. or an institutional affiliation, by the early 1960s, just before she published her next book, Rachel Carson was America’s most famous science writer. The public loved her, the media trusted her, and the government turned to her.
In 1962, Rachel Carson published Silent Spring, an angry, raging, no-holds-barred polemic against pesticides—especially one called DDT. From the first page—a quote from E. B. White—Silent Spring made it clear that this was not a subject for equivocation. “I am pessimistic about the human race,” wrote White, “because it is too ingenious for its own good. Our approach to nature is to beat it into submission. We would stand a better chance of survival if we accommodated ourselves to this planet and viewed it appreciatively instead of skeptically and dictatorially.”
The first chapter, titled “A Fable for Tomorrow,” began innocently: “There was once a town in the heart of America where all life seemed to live in harmony with its surroundings.” A town with “prosperous farms, with fields of grain, and hillsides of orchards.” A town where “white clouds of bloom drifted above the green fields.” A town “famous for the abundance and variety of its bird life.” But a dark cloud was hovering in the distance. “Then a strange blight crept over the area and everything began to change…Mysterious maladies swept the flocks of chickens…the cattle and sheep sickened and died…roadsides…were now lined with browned and withered vegetation as though swept by fire…streams were lifeless…everywhere there was the shadow of death.” Birds, especially, had fallen victim to this strange evil. “The birds…where had they gone? Feeding stations in the backyard were deserted [and] the few birds seen anywhere were moribund; they trembled violently and could not fly.” In a town that had once “throbbed with the dawn chorus of robins, catbirds, doves, jays, wrens, and scores of other bird voices there was now no sound, only silence.” A silent spring. Birds weren’t alone in their suffering. According to Carson, an increasing number of children were suffering from birth defects, liver disease, and leukemia. And women were suffering from infertility. “There had been several sudden and unexplained deaths,” wrote Carson, “not only among adults but even among children, who would be stricken suddenly while at play and die within a few hours.”
Carson had made it clear from the start that she wasn’t talking about something that might happen—she was talking about something that had happened. “Many real communities have already suffered,” she wrote. “A grim specter has crept upon us almost unnoticed.” Silent Spring was a book about pesticides—a book that read like stories from the Brothers Grimm. Worse, despite all our efforts, the insects were fighting back, now stronger and more voracious than ever. Our response, it seemed, was simply to make more chemicals; between 1947 and 1960, production of synthetic pesticides increased from 124 million pounds to 638 million pounds. According to Rachel Carson, our war against nature had become a war against ourselves.
Although the U.S. Department of Agriculture had placed some restrictions on DDT a few years before the publication of Silent Spring (because of stream pollution), Carson’s book ignited a movement that would eventually eliminate the pesticide from the face of the earth.
—
ON AUGUST 29, 1962, one month before Silent Spring was published, President John F. Kennedy appeared at a press conference. One reporter asked, “Mr. President, there appears to be a growing concern among scientists as to the possibility of dangerous long-range side effects from the widespread use of DDT and other pesticides. Have you considered asking the Department of Agriculture or the Public Health Service to take a closer look at this?” “Yes,” replied Kennedy. “And I know that they already are. I think, particularly, of course, since Miss Carson’s book, they are examining the issue.” Carson’s book was already having an impact. And it hadn’t even been published yet. Kennedy learned about it from three excerpts that had been serialized in the New Yorker that summer.
President Kennedy wasn’t the only one who had taken notice. Just before publication, scores of newspapers and magazines had reviewed the book, virtually all favorably. Walter Sullivan, a science reporter and editor wrote, “In her new book, [Rachel Carson] tries to scare the living daylights out of us and, in large measure, succeeds.”
Two weeks after publication, Silent Spring sold 65,000 copies.
Two weeks after that, in October 1962, the Book of the Month Club sold 150,000 more copies, helped in no small part by an endorsement from U.S. Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, who called it “the most important chronicle of this century for the human race.”
By Christmas, Silent Spring was #1 on the New York Times best-seller list, where it remained for 31 weeks. Sales weren’t limited to the United States. Translated into 22 languages, Silent Spring became an international best seller, described as “one of the most influential books in the modern world.” Later, the New York Times and New York Public Library listed Silent Spring as one of the 100 most important books of the 20th century.
Carson had become an environmental guru. One month after publication of Silent Spring, a journalist named Jane Howard profiled Carson in a Life magazine article titled “The Gentle Storm Center: A Calm Appraisal of Silent Spring,” Howard called Carson “a formidable adversary” and painted her as the leader of a powerful new movement. Carson didn’t see it that way. “I have no wish to start a Carrie Nation crusade,” said Carson, referring to a prominent leader in America’s temperance movement. “I wrote the book because I think there is a great danger that the next generation will have no chance to know nature as we do—if we don’t preserve it, the damage will be irreversible.” Howard also tried to portray Carson as an early feminist. Again, Carson resisted. “I’m not interested in things done by women or men,” she said, “but in things done by people.”
Two months after publication, Eric Sevareid interviewed Rachel Carson for his popular television program CBS Reports, the precursor to 60 Minutes. For two days in November 1962, Sevareid talked with Carson, who was now suffering from metastatic breast cancer, a disease that would take her life 17 months later. Thin, haggard, and wearing a heavy black wig to hide the hair loss she had suffered following radiation therapy, Carson marshaled on. But her illness was evident. At the end of the interview, knowing that it would be months before the show aired, Sevareid turned to his producer, Jay McMullen, and said, “Jay, you’ve got a dead leading lady.”
On April 3, 1963, one year before Rachel Carson died from metastatic breast cancer, CBS Reports aired “The Silent Spring of Rachel Carson.” The show pitted Carson against an established scientist named Robert H. White-Stevens. Most Americans watching the show assumed that Carson, with her “poison book” in hand, would be strident, sensational, and wild-eyed, while White-Stevens, who wore a lab coat, would be the level-headed male
voice of reason. This was, after all, the early 1960s; women scientists were virtually nonexistent. It didn’t work out that way. “If man were to faithfully follow the teachings of Miss Carson,” said White-Stevens, with a flourish of hyperbole, “we would return to the Dark Ages, and the insects and diseases and vermin would once again inherit the earth.”
Carson, on the other hand, was patient and calm. “We’ve heard the benefits of pesticides,” she said. “We have heard a great deal about their safety, but very little about their hazards, very little about their failures, their inefficiencies. And yet the public was being asked to accept these chemicals, was being asked to acquiesce in their use, and did not have the whole picture. So I set about to remedy the balance there.” Carson, not White-Stevens, was given the last word. “We still talk in terms of conquest,” she said. “We still haven’t become mature enough to think of ourselves as only a tiny part of a vast and incredible universe. I think we’re challenged as mankind has never been challenged before, to prove our maturity and our mastery, not of nature, but of ourselves.” Fifteen million Americans watched CBS Reports. Rachel Carson had become a phenomenon. A few weeks later, Carson appeared on the Today Show, yet another opportunity to warn millions of Americans about the dangers of pesticides.
The day after CBS Reports aired, Senator Hubert Humphrey (D-MN) asked the Committee on Government Operations to conduct a congressional review of environmental hazards, including pesticides. On May 15, 1963, Rachel Carson appeared as the star witness. At issue was not whether there would be broader federal oversight of pesticide use, but rather which agency would do it. Jostling for control were the Food and Drug Administration, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the Department of the Interior, and the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare. When Carson sat down in front of the microphone, Senator Abraham Ribicoff (D-CT), the chair of the committee, enthused, “You’re the lady who started it all!” After Carson finished testifying, Senator Ernest Gruening (D-AK) predicted that Silent Spring would “change the course of history.” Two days after the Ribicoff committee meeting, Carson appeared before the Department of Commerce and asked for a “Pesticide Commission” to oversee the use of pesticides. Ten years later, Carson’s “Pesticide Commission” became the Environmental Protection Agency.
Pandora's Lab Page 15