Today in history (born in 1907): Rachel Carson, environmental writer - marine biologist

from Writer's Almanac (Garrison Keillor: Minnesota Public Radio):

May 27 is the birthday of zoologist and writer Rachel Carson, born in Springdale, Pennsylvania, in 1907. As a girl, she loved birds and nature, and wanted to be a writer, and she was first published at the age of 10 in a literary magazine for children. She majored in English at Pennsylvania College for women, and continued to write poetry, but in her junior year she took a biology course, which inspired her to change her major to zoology.


She first combined her two loves -- marine zoology and writing -- in a job with the U.S. Bureau of Fisheries in 1936, where she wrote and edited the department's publications. An article she published in The Atlantic Monthly in 1937 ended up being the basis for her first book, Under the Sea-Wind (1941). In it, she combined lyrical prose with a great deal of scientific information. Her second book, The Sea Around Us, was published 10 years later and was critically and commercially successful. It won the National Book Award for Nonfiction, and in her acceptance speech, she said: "The aim of science is to discover and illuminate truth. And that, I take it, is the aim of literature, whether biography or history or fiction. It seems to me, then, that there can be no separate literature of science. ... The winds, the sea, and the moving tides are what they are. If there is wonder and beauty and majesty in them, science will discover these qualities. If they are not there, science cannot create them. If there is poetry in my book about the sea, it is not because I deliberately put it there, but because no one could write truthfully about the sea and leave out the poetry."

"The feeding stations in the backyards were deserted," she wrote, early in the 1960s. "The few birds seen anywhere were moribund; they trembled violently and could not fly. It was a spring without voices. On the mornings that had once throbbed with the dawn chorus of robins, catbirds, doves, jays, wrens, and scores of other bird voices there was now no sound; only silence lay over the fields and woods and marsh." Her 1962 book Silent Spring, first serialized in The New Yorker, brought her a lot of attention, both positive and negative. Its subject was environmental pollution and its effects on plants and animals, and she particularly spoke out against indiscriminate pesticide abuse. She got the expected support from environmental and conservation groups, but the chemical companies, supported by the Agriculture Department, threatened her with lawsuits before the book was even published. They tried smear tactics, calling her a "hysterical woman" who was unqualified to write about the subject. Eventually, though, the book led to the banning of DDT, the beginning of a grassroots environmental movement, and the formation of the Environmental Protection Agency. She still has her critics, though; the conservative magazine Human Events gave Silent Spring an honorable mention on their list of "Ten Most Harmful Books of the 19th and 20th Centuries" and she has been blamed for millions of malaria deaths worldwide, even though she herself never advocated a wholesale ban on DDT. She died of breast and liver cancer in the spring of 1964.