CARSON, RACHEL Mother of Environmental Movement (c) By Polly Guerin

Dear Rachel Carson: To you, society owes a measure of gratitude. In your book, “Silent Spring,” the first work to detail the dangers of pesticides and pollution you raised the alarm that the widespread of pesticides (and other chemicals) travel through the food chain, contaminate the environment, remain for many years in soils and waters, and accumulate in the human body. Although pesticide and chemical industries retaliated and mounted an intense publicity campaign against your findings, you remained steadfast, a woman determined to succeed in bringing the environmental message to the masses. As a scientist and activist you had a chilling vision and foresaw a time when “On the mornings that once throbbed with the dawn chorus of robins, catbirds, doves, wrens and scores of other bird voices there was now no sound; only silence lay over the fields and woods and marsh.”
THE MODERN ENVIRONMENTAL MOVEMENT
Rachel Carson is credited with starting the modern environmental movement. She was not exactly opposed to the use of insecticides and chemicals, only their indiscriminate, widespread use. Carson noticed that the unchecked use of DDT was no longer effective in killing insects as they were slowly developing immunities to the poisons. However, the pesticides were killing other animals. She feared this would cause an extreme ecological catastrophe. Further she pointed out, “The sprays, dusts and aerosols now applied universally to farms, gardens, forests and homes have the power to kill every insert, the good and the bad, to still the song of the birds, end the leaping of fish in the streams, to coat the leaves with a deadly film and to linger on in the soil---all this, though the intended target may be only a few weeds or insects.”
GOVERNMENT INVESTIGATES
Although Carson’s writings were attacked by chemical manufactures who tried to dismiss her as an alarmist and the book drew threats of lawsuits she had sounded the alarm and the Silent Spring caught the attention of the government. In 1963, President John F. Kennedy set up a special commission, the Science Advisory Committee, to investigate her findings. She testified before congress and called for new policies to protect human health and the environment, and this set the stage for the first legislation regulating pesticides, and her activism led to a ban on the use of DDT.
WHO WAS RACHEL LOUISE CARSON? (1907-1964)
The love of nature and the environment has its roots in Carson’s upbringing in the rural Pennsylvania community of Springdale, where she developed a love of nature. She studied biology and zoology in college and then went on to become the first woman to pass the civil service test for federal employment. In 1936, the Bureau of Fisheries hired her as a full-time junior biologist and she wrote several books on the environment, including Under the Sea Wind (1941) the The Sea Around Use (1951). The success of these books enabled Carson to leave the Bureau of Fishers in 1952 to pursue a full-time career in writing.
CARSON’S LEGACY
Carson said, “The more clearly we can focus our attention on the wonders and realities of the universe about us, the less taste we shall have for destruction.” Sadly Carson was battling breast cancer as she wrote the Silent Spring. She succumbed to the disease in 1964, after it became a best seller. Even today Silent Spring remains popular and influential. The name Rachel Carson, The Mother of the Modern Environmental Movement, would be proud to know that the US Environmental Protection Agency was created in 1970. She is the namesake of the Rachel Carson National Wildlife Refuge near Wells, Maine a safe haven for wildlife and to protect the valuable salt marshes and establish sanctuary for migratory birds. www.wilderness.org. In 1980, Carson was award the presidential Medal of Freedom.
RACHEL CARSON’S WARNINGS IN THE SILENT SPRING SOUNDED THE ALARM THAT STILL APPLIES TODAY MORE THAN EVER BEFORE. ABOUT NATURE SHE ONCE SAID, “ONE WAY TO OPEN YOUR EYES IS TO ASK YOURSELF, WHAT IF I HAD NEVER SEEN THIS BEFORE? WHAT IF I KNEW I WOULD NEVER SEE IT AGAIN?”