RACHEL CARSON
Rachel Carson (1907-1964) was born in Springdale, Pennsylvania, about 18 miles northeast of Pittsburgh. Her home, known as the Rachel Carson Homestead, is on the National Register of Historic Places and is open for public and private tours. How did this open to a quiet studious young woman, daughter of an insurance salesman and a mother who inspired her with a love of nature? Although born and raised hundreds of miles inland, Carson early became fascinated with the ocean. She graduated from the Pennsylvania College for Women (A.B., 1929), then Johns Hopkins University (A.M., 1932), and did further graduate study a the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. She considered herself a marine biologist, encompassing in her career zoology, general aquatic biology, and science writing. Her love of writing began as a child and became remarkably honed during a lifetime of productive work, winning fellowships and awards throughout her life, including the National Book Award in 1952.
Everything she wrote is in print. She is considered one of the most influential writers on ecology, public policy and the environment, and the human place within the biosphere. She had an extraordinary sensitivity to the beauty of nature — while simultaneously being solidly grounded in the dispassionate scientific understanding of the natural world. Her skill with words and her no-nonsense understanding of facts and relationships in the environment lent a power to her persuasion most notably in her last book, Silent Spring (1962), which brought about a dramatic redirection in the study of pesticides and their complex consequences.
Too many writers to mention were influenced by her confident ability to capture “the breath of science on the still glass of poetry,” as one critic described her prose. Loren Eiseley, Marianne Moore, Edward Abbey, Annie Dillard, Lewis Thomas, John McPhee, Gary Snyder, Bernd Heinrich, Sy Montgomery — anyone who is compelled to write of the most basic and urgent issue, the survival of humanity on earth, must read Rachel Carson. She is not only a necessity, she is a pleasure and a revelation.
Rachel Carson: Silent Spring & Other Writings on the Environment
Rachel Carson: Silent Spring & Other Writings on the Environment
Here is one of the landmark books of the twentieth century together with an unprecedented collection of letters, speeches, and essays—most published here for the first time—that reveals the extraordinary courage and insight of its author, Rachel Carson. These writings tell the surprising and inspiring story of how Silent Spring came to be, tracing an arc from Carson’s first inklings of the potential harms of DDT in the 1940s to her resolute public defense of her findings in the face of a concerted disinformation campaign launched by the chemical industry, even as she struggled privately with the cancer that would take her life.
Silent Spring was an unlikely best seller when published in the fall of 1962, a book about the unintended consequences of pesticide use that became the talk of the nation, sparking a revolution in environmental consciousness. Seeing clearly what no one else had in a dauntingly wide-ranging body of technical and scientific evidence, Carson turned a series of discrete findings into a work of enduring literature—one that helped to change the world. In the wake of Silent Spring, public debate and protest led to laws and agencies to protect our air, land, and water, and a new appreciation for what Carson calls “the right of the citizen to be secure in his own home against the intrusions of poisons applied by other persons.”
This deluxe Library of America edition presents the complete text of the first edition of Silent Spring, featuring Lois and Louis Darling’s original illustrations, in conjunction with a selection of Carson’s other writings on the environment, including fascinating correspondence with ornithologists, medical researchers, ecologists, biochemists, and other experts that shows Silent Spring taking shape piece-by-piece, like a puzzle or detective story. As she makes common cause with gardeners, concerned citizens, and grassroots activists to build awareness about environmental degradation, we see Carson emerge as a champion for unbiased science, collective action, and above all reverence for life. In speeches and editorials from the period after the her well-funded critics, exposing industry influence within scientific societies and government policy-making. Other pieces reflect her lifelong love of nature and commitment to conservation, lyrically describing her epiphanies as birdwatcher and beachcomber, her dream of preserving forest land in Maine for future generations, and the joy she took in conveying an outdoor “sense of wonder” to her young adopted son.
An introduction by writer and biologist Sandra Steingraber explores Carson’s life and career, and describes some of the contemporary environmental science for which she blazed a trail. Also included are a 16-page portfolio of photographs, a detailed chronology, and helpful notes.
Sandra Steingraber, editor, is Distinguished Scholar in Residence at Ithaca College; her books include Living Downstream: An Ecologist’s Personal Investigation of Cancer and the Environment (1997), Having Faith: An Ecologist’s Journey to Motherhood (2001), and Raising Elijah: Protecting Our Children in an Age of Environmental Crisis (2011). A cancer survivor and scientist, she is one of America’s leading environmental writers and anti-pollution advocates.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction by Sandra Steingraber
SILENT SPRING
OTHER WRITINGS ON THE ENVIRONMENT
To Harold Lynch (July 15, 1945)
To Shirley Briggs (September 28, 1946)
To Raymond J. Brown (October 15, 1946)
To Edwin Way Teale (February 2, 1947)
To Maria Carson (September 21, 1947)
To Shirley Briggs (September 29, 1947)
Mr. Day’s Dismissal (April 22, 1953)
To Fon Boardman (c. September 1953)
To Dorothy Freeman (September 28, 1953)
To Dorothy Freeman (January 21, 1954)
The Real World Around Us (Theta Sigma Phi Matrix Table Dinner, Columbus, Ohio, April 21, 1954)
To Dorothy Freeman (June 1, 1954)
To Edwin Way Teale (August 16, 1955)
Help Your Child to Wonder (July 1956)
To Stanley and Dorothy Freeman (August 8, 1956)
To Curtis and Nellie Lee Bok (December 12, 1956)
To DeWitt Wallace (January 27, 1958)
To Dorothy Freeman (February 1, 1958)
To Marie Rodell (February 2, 1958)
To E. B. White (February 3, 1958)
To Dorothy Freeman (June 12, 1958)
To Edwin Way Teale (October 12, 1958)
To Marjorie Spock (November 17, 1958)
To Marjorie Spock (December 4, 1958)
To William Shawn (February 14, 1959)
“Vanishing Americans” (April 10, 1959)
To Beverly Knecht (April 12, 1959)
To R. D. Radeleff (May 20, 1959)
To J. I. McClurkin (September 28, 1959)
To Grace Barstow Murphy (November 16, 1959)
To Dorothy Freeman (November 19, 1959)
To Morton S. Biskind (December 3, 1959)
To Dorothy Freeman (c. December 7, 1959)
To Marjorie Spock and Polly Richards (April 12, 1960)
To C. Girard Davidson (June 8, 1960)
To Marjorie Spock (September 27, 1960)
To Dorothy Freeman (October 12, 1960)
To Clarence Cottam (January 4, 1961)
To Paul Brooks (June 26, 1961)
To Dorothy Freeman (January 6, 1962)
To Dorothy Freeman (January 23, 1962)
To Frank E. Egler (January 29, 1962)
To Lois Crisler (February 8, 1962)
To Dorothy Freeman (April 5, 1962)
To Dorothy Freeman (May 20, 1962)
Of Man and the Stream of Time (Scripps College, Claremont, California, June 12, 1962)
Form Letter to Correspondents (August 2, 1962)
On the Reception of Silent Spring (December 2, 1962)
Speech to the Women’s National Press Club (Washington, D.C., December 5, 1962)
Speech Accepting the Schweitzer Medal (Animal Welfare Institute, Washington, D.C., January 7, 1963)
Speech to the Garden Club of America (New York, January 8, 1963)
To Walter P. Nickell (January 14, 1963)
To Dorothy Freeman (March 27, 1963)
To Dorothy Freeman (April 1, 1963)
She Started It All––Here’s Her Reaction (May 19, 1963)
Environmental Hazards: Control of Pesticides and Other Chemical Poisons Statement before the Subcommittee on Reorganization and International Organizations of the Committee on Government Operations (Washington, D.C., June 4, 1963)
To Dorothy Freeman (September 10, 1963)
The Pollution of Our Environment (Kaiser Foundation Hospitals and Permanente Medical Group Seventh Annual Symposium, “Man Against Himself, ” San Francisco, California, October 18, 1963)
To Dorothy Freeman (October 21, 1963)
To Dorothy Freeman (October 26, 1963)
To Walter C. Bauer (November 12, 1963)
To C. J. Briejèr (December 2, 1963)
Speech Accepting the Audubon Medal of the National Audubon Society (New York, December 3, 1963)