Rachel Carson - Women's History Month 6

 Born in 1907 in Springdale, PA, Rachel Carson grew up in the hills overlooking the Allegheny River, where she fell in love with nature after exploring the landscapes and wildlife on walks with her mother. And it was also there that she fell in love with writing, winning several awards in her youth. She would tell people her dream was to become a writer.

While her family was not well off, her mother insisted that Rachel attend college. Rachel entered intending to study English but changed her major to biology. After graduating, she earned a master's degree in zoology and then began a doctorate. But because of the Great Depression and with her father's passing in 1935, Rachel dropped out, taking a job with the U.S. Bureau of Fisheries to help support her family.

In addition to working in this job, Rachel began writing articles about environmental issues for publications. Those articles evolved into books. And in these works, which were beloved by many, she helped people better understand nature while courageously challenging practices that hurt people and the environment. These challenges had policy implications, leading to a national ban on DDT and other pesticides.

Many of us, including myself, consider her the mother of the environmental movement.

Today more than ever before, we must each individually decide what we can do to help keep our earth safe in which to live and thrive against the forces of climate change.

From the Marginalian:

“The real wealth of the Nation,” marine biologist and author Rachel Carson wrote in her courageous 1953 protest letter, “lies in the resources of the earth — soil, water, forests, minerals, and wildlife… Their administration is not properly, and cannot be, a matter of politics.” Carson’s legacy inspired the creation of Earth Day and the founding of the Environmental Protection Agency, whose hard-won environmental regulations are now being undone in the hands of a heedless administration. Carson was a scientist who thought and wrote like a poet. As she catalyzed the modern environmental movement with her epoch-making 1962 book Silent Spring, she was emboldened by a line from a 1914 poem by Ella Wheeler Wilcox:

To sin by silence, when we should protest, makes cowards out of men.