Carson, Rachel
From Philosopedia
Carson, Rachel (1907—1964) A marine biologist, Carson wrote Silent Spring (1962) to show the dangers involved in the use of insecticides. A humanist, she also wrote Under the Sea Wind (1941), The Sea Around Us (1951), and The Edge of the Sea (1954). Her Silent Spring probably did more than any other single book or event to set off the new environmental movement which commenced in the United States in the 1960s. She called the chemicals used for insect and week control “elixirs of death,” adding, “For the first time in the history of the world, every human being is now subjected to contact with dangerous chemicals, from the moment of conception until death.” In graphic terms, she explained that “As few as 11 large earthworms can transfer a lethal dose of DDT to a robin. And 11 worms form a small part of day’s rations to a bird that eats 10 to 12 earthworms in as many minutes.” Her work was greeted with ridicule and denunciation by the chemical industry and parts of the food industry, and Newsweek accused her of raising “paranoid fears” akin to those of “such cultists as anti-fluoridation leaguers, organic-garden faddists, and other beyond-the-fringe groups.” Complained a federal pest control member, “I thought she was a spinster. What’s she so worried about genetics for?” Actually, Carson, who was fifty-five when the book was published, had been diagnosed as having the cancer that would later kill her. Although called a spinster, a term she abhorred, she was not an unloving spinster. In Martha Freeman’s Always, Rachel: The Letters of Rachel Carson and Dorothy Freeman, 1952—1964, one of Carson’s letters to Freeman included the following:
You must have sensed that I couldn’t express myself adequately last night. What I wanted to do was hold you in my arms to be able to tell you just what your happiness means to me. Can you possibly know? Your voice came over so clearly that you seemed to be quite near–so near, dear, it made me ache to be with you.
Growing up on a farm in western Pennsylvania, she became an amateur naturalist and was fascinated by Darwinism, according to Paul Brooks’s The House of Life (1972). Brooks tells the story that when her mother, the daughter of a Presbyterian minister, told her that God had created the world, she retorted, “Yes . . . and General Motors created the Oldsmobile, but how is the question.” Carson often anthropomorphized nature, attributing human feelings to fish and animals. “I have spoken of a fish ‘fearing’ his enemies,” she explained, “not because I suppose a fish experiences fear in the same way that we do, but because I think he behaves as though he were frightened.” Carson’s sense of rectitude was remarkable, notes Daniel J. Kevles, who heads the Program in Science, Ethics, and Public Policy at the California Institute of Technology: “Because she was earning so much money from The Sea Around Us, she returned a fellowship to the Guggenheim Foundation. Her sensitivity to nature was informed by a Thoreau-like transcendentalism: letters from readers, she said, “suggest that they have found refreshment and release from tension in the contemplation of millions and billions of years–in the long vistas of geologic time in which men had no part–in the realization that, despite our own utter dependence on the earth, this same earth and sea have no need of us.” Toward the end of her life, Carson battled failing eyesight, angina, and the pain of cancer. Having been encouraged by Freeman to play the piano, Carson wrote in her last letter to Freeman,
Not long ago I sat late in my study and played Beethoven and achieved a feeling of real peace and even happiness. Never forget, dear one, how deeply I have loved you all these years.
(Donald Fleming in Perspectives in American History (1972, No. VI) discusses transcendentalism in Carson’s writings.)
