Rachel Carson facts for kids
Quick facts for kids
Rachel Louise Carson
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Carson in 1943
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| Born | May 27, 1907 Springdale, Pennsylvania, U.S. |
| Died | April 14, 1964 (aged 56) Silver Spring, Maryland, U.S. |
| Occupation | Marine biologist, author and environmentalist |
| Alma mater | Chatham University (BA) Johns Hopkins University (MS) |
| Period | 1937–1964 |
| Genre | Nature writing |
| Subject | Marine biology, ecology, pesticides |
| Notable works | Under the Sea Wind (1941) The Sea Around Us (1951) The Edge of the Sea (1955) Silent Spring (1962) |
Rachel Louise Carson (May 27, 1907 – April 14, 1964) was an American marine biologist, writer, and conservationist whose influential book Silent Spring (1962) and other writings advanced the global environmental movement.
Contents
Early life and education
Rachel Carson was born on May 27, 1907 in Springdale, Pennsylvania and grew up on a family farm. It was on the Allegheny River, near Pittsburgh. Carson liked to read, and was a talented writer from an young age. She also spent a lot of time exploring around her 65-acre (26 ha) farm.
Carson attended Springdale's small school through tenth grade, then completed high school in nearby Parnassus, Pennsylvania. She graduated high school in 1925, at the top of her class of forty-four students.
At the Pennsylvania College for Women (now known as Chatham University), as in high school, Carson was a bit of a loner. She originally studied English, but switched her major to biology in January 1928. She continued writing in the school's student newspaper. Though accepted to graduate school at Johns Hopkins University in 1928, she had to remain at the Pennsylvania College for Women for her senior year because of money problems. She graduated magna cum laude (highest honors) in 1929. After a summer course at the Marine Biological Laboratory, she continued her studies in zoology and genetics at Johns Hopkins in the fall of 1929.
After her first year of graduate school, Carson worked in a laboratory with rats and Drosophila, to earn money for tuition. She wrote her dissertation for her master's degree on how the pronephros in fish developed early in their life. She earned a master's degree in zoology in June 1932. She wanted to continue for a doctorate, but in 1934 Carson had to leave Johns Hopkins to find a full-time teaching job to help support her family. In 1935, her father died suddenly, and Carson had to take care of her aging mother. This made the money problem even bigger (this was during the Great Depression, when jobs were hard to find).
Career
Working as a biologist
Her biology mentor from college helped her get a part-time job with the U.S. Bureau of Fisheries. Here she wrote for a educational broadcast called Romance Under the Waters on the radio (this was before television). It was a seven-minute program that ran once a week for a year. It was about aquatic life (mostly fish), to increase public interest in fish biology and in what the Bureau of Fisheries did. This was a job several people before Carson had not been able to do. Carson also began submitting articles on marine life in the Chesapeake Bay to local newspapers and magazines.
Carson's boss liked what she did, and asked her to write the introduction to a public brochure about the fisheries bureau. He also had her apply to the first full-time job that became available. When she took the civil service exam, she outscored all other applicants. In 1936 she became only the second woman to be hired by the Bureau of Fisheries for a full-time, professional position, as a junior aquatic biologist. Carson worked for 15 years in the U.S. Bureau of Fisheries and then the United States Fish and Wildlife Service.
As author
Her 1951 bestselling book The Sea Around Us allowed her to work full-time as a nature writer. The Sea Around Us remained on The New York Times Best Seller list for 86 weeks and won the 1952 National Book Award for Nonfiction and the John Burroughs Medal. For this book, Carson was awarded two honorary doctorates. She also licensed a documentary film based on it.
People recognized her as a gifted writer. Her next book, The Edge of the Sea, and the republished version of her first book, Under the Sea Wind, were also bestsellers. Together, the three books explore all parts of ocean life, from the shores to the surface to the deep sea.
In the late 1950s, Carson became interested in conservation and the environmental problems caused by new pesticides. At first, she did not want to write about it, but nobody else would write about the problems of pesticides. So she studied the problem, and wrote Silent Spring (published in 1962).
Silent Spring is Carson's most influential book. The book described the harmful effects of pesticides on the environment. It is believed to have launched the environmental movement. In 1994, an edition of Silent Spring was published with an introduction written by Vice President Al Gore.
Relationship with Dorothy Freeman
Carson met Dorothy M. Freeman in the summer of 1953 on Southport Island, Maine. Freeman had written to Carson welcoming her to the area when she had heard that the famous author was to become her neighbor. It was the beginning of a devoted friendship that would last the rest of Carson's life.
Their relationship was conducted mainly through letters and during summers spent together in Maine. Over 12 years, they exchanged around 900 letters. Many of these were published in the book Always, Rachel, published in 1995 by Beacon Press.
Death
Weakened from breast cancer and her treatment regimen, Carson became ill with a respiratory virus in January 1964. Her condition worsened, and in February, doctors found that she had severe anemia from her radiation treatments and in March they discovered that the cancer had reached her liver. She died of a heart attack on April 14, 1964, in her home in Silver Spring, Maryland.
Her body was cremated and Carson's ashes were divided for burial beside her mother at Parklawn Memorial Gardens, Rockville, Maryland, and the rest scattered along the coast of Squirrel Island, near the Sheepscot River in Maine.
Posthumous honors
Carson's life and work has been widely celebrated since her death.
- The University of California, Santa Cruz, named one of its colleges (formerly known as College Eight) Rachel Carson College in 2016. Rachel Carson College is the first college at the university to bear a woman's name.
- Munich's Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society was founded in 2009.
- Carson's birthplace and childhood home in Springdale, Pennsylvania, now known as the Rachel Carson Homestead, became a National Register of Historic Places site and the nonprofit Rachel Carson Homestead Association was created in 1975 to manage it.
- Her home in Colesville, Maryland where she wrote Silent Spring was named a National Historic Landmark in 1991.
- Near Pittsburgh, a 35.7 miles (57 km) hiking trail, called the Rachel Carson Trail and maintained by the Rachel Carson Trails Conservancy, was dedicated to Carson in 1975.
- A Pittsburgh bridge was also renamed in Carson's honor as the Rachel Carson Bridge.
- The Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection State Office Building in Harrisburg is named in her honor.
- Elementary schools in Gaithersburg, Montgomery County, Maryland, Sammamish, Washington and San Jose, California were named in her honor, as were middle schools in Beaverton, Oregon, Queens, New York (Rachel Carson Intermediate School) and Herndon, Virginia (Rachel Carson Middle School), and a high school in Brooklyn, New York.
- Two research vessels have sailed in the United States bearing the name R/V Rachel Carson.
- A number of conservation areas have been named for Carson as well.
Carson is also a frequent namesake for prizes awarded by philanthropic, educational and scholarly institutions:
- The Rachel Carson Prize, founded in Stavanger, Norway in 1991, is awarded to women who have made a contribution in the field of environmental protection.
- The American Society for Environmental History has awarded the Rachel Carson Prize for Best Dissertation since 1993.
- Since 1998, the Society for Social Studies of Science has awarded an annual Rachel Carson Book Prize for "a book length work of social or political relevance in the area of science and technology studies."
- The Society of Environmental Journalists gives an annual award and two honourable mentions for books on environmental issues in Carson's name, such as was awarded to Joe Roman's Listed: Dispatches from America's Endangered Species Act in 2012.
- The Sierra Club and its foundation recognize donors who have provided for the club in their estate plans as the Rachel Carson Society.
- The Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München (Germany) awards post-doctoral fellowships in the area of the environment and society.
Interesting facts about Rachel Carson
- An avid reader, she began writing stories (often involving animals) at age eight. She had her first story published at age ten.
- She especially enjoyed the St. Nicholas Magazine (which carried her first published stories), the works of Beatrix Potter, and the novels of Gene Stratton-Porter, and in her teen years, Herman Melville, Joseph Conrad and Robert Louis Stevenson.
- She especially liked to read about the natural world, particularly the ocean.
- The documantary based on her book The Sea Around Us won the 1953 Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature.
- In 2012, her book Silent Spring was designated a National Historic Chemical Landmark by the American Chemical Society for its role in the development of the modern environmental movement.
- After the death of her elder sister, Carson took care of her two nieces.
- On June 9, 1980, Carson was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian honor in the United States.
- A 17¢ Great Americans series postage stamp was issued in her honor in 1981.
- In 1973, Carson was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame.
- Google created a Google Doodle for Carson's 107th birthday on May 27, 2014.
- The Rachel Carson sculpture in Woods Hole, Massachusetts was unveiled on July 14, 2013.
- Carson was featured during the "HerStory" video tribute to notable women on U2's tour in 2017 for the 30th anniversary of The Joshua Tree during a performance of "Ultraviolet (Light My Way)" from the band's 1991 album Achtung Baby.
- In 2007, American author Ginger Wadsworth wrote a biography of Carson.
- Carson bequeathed her manuscripts and papers to Yale University.
Rachel Carson quotes
- "The aim of science is to discover and illuminate truth."
- "I like to define biology as the history of the earth and all its life — past, present, and future."
- "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?"
- "It is not half so important to know as to feel."
- " Those who contemplate the beauty of the earth find reserves of strength that will endure as long as life lasts."
- "As human beings, we are part of the whole stream of life."
- "Mankind has gone very far into an artificial world of his own creation. He has sought to insulate himself, in his cities of steel and concrete, from the realities of earth and water and the growing seed. Intoxicated with a sense of his own power, he seems to be going farther and farther into more experiments for the destruction of himself and his world."
See also
In Spanish: Rachel Carson para niños
