Rachel Louise Carson (May 27, 1907 – April 14, 1964) was a gifted nature writer and marine biologist who woke the nation to the dangers of pesticide. Carson started her career as a biologist in the U.S. Bureau of Fisheries, and became a full-time nature writer in the 1950s. Her sea trilogy explores the whole of ocean life, from the shores to the surface to the deep sea.
In the late 1950s, Carson turned her attention to conservation and the environmental problems caused by synthetic pesticides. The result was Silent Spring (1962). Serialized in the New Yorker, Silent Spring meticulously laid out the case for pesticide poisoning of the environment. Not surprisingly it was immediately attacked by the chemical industry. But their smear campaign failed to keep the public away and instead the book became a runaway best seller, remembered 40 years later for its groundbreaking arguments. Silent Spring spurred a reversal in national pesticide policy—leading years later to a nationwide ban on DDT and other pesticides. Critics have attacked the ban on DDT as resulting in many deaths from Malaria, but there are other solutions to malaria control, so that argument contains false logic. Carson's work was an influencer in the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency.
Carson was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
Learn more:
- Under the Sea Wind by Rachel Carson (1941).
- The Sea Around Us by Rachel Carson (1951).
- The Edge of the Sea by Rachel Carson (1955).
- Silent Spring by Rachel Carson (1962).
- The Sense of Wonder by Rachel Carson (1965).
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