Rachel Carson

6 Pages 1511 Words

Rachel Louise Carson was born on May 7, 1907 in the rural river town of Springdale, PA. She graduated from Pennsylvania College for Women, which is now known as Chatham College, in 1929 with a major of Marine Biology. She then studied at the Woods Hole Marine Biological Laboratory and later received her MA in Zoology from Johns Hopkins University in 1932. Carson 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 then began a fifteen-year career in the federal services as a scientist and editor in 1936. Working for the government, she then became Editor-in-Chief of all publications for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (Lear).
Carson wrote pamphlets on conservation and natural resources. She also edited scientific articles, but on free time, turned her government research into lyric prose, first as an article “Undersea” in 1937, and then a book, Under the Sea-Wind in 1941. She published her prize-winning study of the ocean, The Sea Around Us in 1952, which was followed in 1955 by The Edge of the Sea. She was devoted to writing, so she resigned from the government.
During World War II, Rachel Carson changed her focuses. She wanted to warn the public about the long term misuse of chemical pesticides. She wrote a book in 1962 called Silent Spring in which she challenged the practices of agricultural scientists and government. It called for a change in the way humankind viewed the world. Because of this book, she was attacked by the chemical industry and some government and considered an alarmist. Through all this, she spoke out to remind the public that we are a vulnerable part of the natural world, and we are subject to the same damage as the rest of the ecosystem. Her testimony before Congress in 1963 called for new policies to protect human health and the environment. Rachel Lou...