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: The Sea Trilogy
Rachel Carson: The Sea Trilogy
Pioneering environmentalist Rachel Carson explores the wonders of the Earth’s oceans in these classics of American science and nature writing.
Rachel Carson is perhaps most famous as the author of Silent Spring, but she was first and foremost a “poet of the sea” and the three books collected in this deluxe Library of America volume are classics of American science and nature writing.
Under the Sea-Wind (1941), Carson’s lyrical debut, offers an intimate account of maritime ecology through the eyes of three of the ocean’s denizens, the individual lives of sanderling, mackerel, and eel dramatically intertwined in the enduring ebb and flow of the tides.
The Sea Around Us (1951)–a winner of the National Book Award–draws on a wealth of oceanographic, meteorological, biological, and historical research to present its subject on a grand, biospheric scale, revealing not only many mysteries of the still-unfathomed depths, but a reverence for the sea as a source of global climate and of life itself.
Concluding Carson’s “sea trilogy,” The Edge of the Sea (1955) explores the habits of the many small creatures that live on shorelines and in tidepools accessible to any beachcomber: part identification guide, part hymn to ecological complexity, it is a book that conveys the “sense of wonder” in nature for which Carson is justly celebrated.
At a moment when overfishing, pollution, and global warming are causing catastrophic changes to marine environments worldwide, Carson’s lyrically detailed accounts of these environments offer a timely reminder of their beauty, fragility, and immense consequence for human life.