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.
Silent Spring [hardcover]
Silent Spring [hardcover]
First published by Houghton Mifflin in 1962, Silent Spring alerted a large audience to the environmental and human dangers of indiscriminate use of pesticides, spurring revolutionary changes in the laws affecting our air, land, and water. “Silent Spring became a runaway bestseller, with international reverberations . . . [It is] well crafted, fearless and succinct . . . Even if she had not inspired a generation of activists, Carson would prevail as one of the greatest nature writers in American letters” (Peter Matthiessen, for Time’s 100 Most Influential People of the Century).
This edition celebrates Rachel Carson’s watershed book with a new introduction by the author and activist Terry Tempest Williams and a new afterword by the acclaimed Rachel Carson biographer Linda Lear, who tells the story of Carson’s courageous defense of her truths in the face of ruthless assault from the chemical industry in the year following the publication of Silent Spring and before her untimely death in 1964.