Today Tuesday March 13, 2012 the WOD is Rachel Carson (1907-1964) writer, scientist, and ecologist. I do believe I did her as a WOD a long time ago (or I just ment to) either way she is worth a re-visit. I was inspired by my recent trip to the Franklin Institute with my daughter’s 8th grade class. There is a mosaic of her on the wall down near the kid’s lunchrooms/bathrooms. I was waiting for my group to come out of the lunchroom and bam there she was.
Rachel Carson was born on May 27, 1907, on a small family farm near Springdale, Pennsylvania, just up theAllegheny River from Pittsburgh. Her mother bequeathed to her a life-long love of nature and the living world that Rachel expressed first as a writer and later as a student of marine biology. An avid reader, she also spent a lot of time exploring around her family's 65-acre farm. She began writing stories (often involving animals) at age eight, and had her first story published at age eleven. Carson graduated from Pennsylvania College for Women (now Chatham College) in 1929, studied at the Woods Hole Marine Biological Laboratory, and received her MA in zoology from Johns Hopkins University in 1932.
She was hired by the U.S. Bureau of Fisheries to write radio scripts during the Depression and supplemented her income writing feature articles on natural history for the Baltimore Sun. She began a fifteen-year career in the federal service as a scientist and editor in 1936 and rose to become Editor-in-Chief of all publications for the U. S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
She wrote pamphlets on conservation and natural resources and edited scientific articles, but in her free time turned her government research into lyric prose, first as an article "Undersea" (1937, for the Atlantic Monthly), and then in a book, Under the Sea-wind (1941). In 1952 she published her prize-winning study of the ocean, The Sea Around Us, which was followed by The Edge of the Sea in 1955. These books constituted a biography of the ocean and made Carson famous as a naturalist and science writer for the public. Carson resigned from government service in 1952 to devote herself to her writing.
She wrote several other articles designed to teach people about the wonder and beauty of the living world, including "Help Your Child to Wonder," (1956) and "Our Ever-Changing Shore" (1957), and planned another book on the ecology of life. Embedded within all of Carson's writing was the view that human beings were but one part of nature distinguished primarily by their power to alter it, in some cases irreversibly.
Disturbed by the profligate use of synthetic chemical pesticides after World War II, Carson reluctantly changed her focus in order to warn the public about the long term effects of misusing pesticides. By fall 1957, Carson was closely following federal proposals for widespread pesticide spraying; theUSDA planned to eradicate fire ants, and other spraying programs involving chlorinated hydrocarbonsand organophosphates were on the rise. For the rest of her life, Carson's main professional focus would be the dangers of pesticide overuse. In Silent Spring (1962) she challenged the practices of agricultural scientists and the government, and called for a change in the way humankind viewed the natural world.
Carson was attacked by the chemical industry and some in government as an alarmist, but courageously spoke out to remind us that we are a vulnerable part of the natural world subject to the same damage as the rest of the ecosystem. Testifying before Congress in 1963, Carson called for new policies to protect human health and the environment. If it weren't for Rachel Carson, the green movement might not exist today. The revelations from her book Silent Spring eventually helped lead to the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency.
Rachel Carson died in 1964 after a long battle against breast cancer. Her witness for the beauty and integrity of life continues to inspire new generations to protect the living world and all its creatures.
