Featured Article
Summer 2022 JAPOS Bulletin, Whole Number 186.
Rachel Carson: Did Her Books Change the World?
by Rene Manes and Clete Delvaux
I own a thin book by Robert Downs entitled Books
That Changed the World: The Mighty Power of the
Printed Word. It describes sixteen great books that
changed the course of history. They range from Copernicus
and Harriet Beecher Stowe to Darwin, Freud,
Einstein, etc. I’d like to propose a more modern addition to
Downs’ list of books: Silent Spring by Rachel
Carson (1907–1964). Much of this article was written
in 2007 by JAPOS member Rene Manes, who died
over a decade ago from cancer—just as Carson did in1964.
In 1980, Rachel Carson was one of 26 people honored
in USPS’s Great Americans series; she was one of
four writers (Sc# 1857) recognized in the group, which
included Walter Lippmann, Pearl Buck, and Sinclair
Lewis. [Editor’s Note: I would welcome an article on
any of the other three by a JAPOS member-writer.]
In 1999, Palau issued a souvenir sheet (Sc# 447–448)
celebrating environmentalists. Sc# 447a shows Carson
with a pelican in the background. In 2000, Marshall Islands
and Zambia also issued stamps honoring Rachel Carson.
Carson was born in western Pennsylvania where
she explored the forests and streams around the family
farm. During her college years, she changed majors
from English to biology, continued with graduate work
at Johns Hopkins University, and then studied marine
biology at Woods Hole, Massachusetts.
Her early studies in English stood her in good stead
when she was employed by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife
Service, where she was often assigned to write guide
books, pamphlets, and bulletins—plus doing radio
scripts on marine life. From 1941 to 1957, she wrote
three books about the sea, one of which, The Sea
Around Us (1951), attained best-seller status and by
1962 had been published in 30 languages. The other
two books were Under the Sea Wind (1941) and The
Edge of the Sea (1955). These three books were dis-
tinguished by Carson’s scholarship, her lyrical prose,
and her ability to inspire her readers with her own
love of nature.
With newly gained financial independence, Rachel
Carson left her government job and retired to a farm.
In 1962, friends urged her to write her last and most
controversial book, Silent Spring. In this book, which
was an immediate success, she aggressively exposed
the dangers of excessive reliance on pesticides,
especially the damage done to birds and wildlife by
uncontrolled use of DDT spraying. The title, Silent
Spring, was inspired by a line in John Keats’ poem “La
Belle Dame sans Merci,” which contains the lines “The
sedge is withered from the lake / And no birds sing.”
The chemical industry, the agriculture sector, the
USDA, and even well-regarded media such as The
New York Times joined forces to immediately counter
attack the book. Lawsuits were threatened, Carson’s
conclusions were questioned and her scientific credibility challenged. Both sides of the intense debates
that followed were guilty of exaggeration and outright
error. But the important environmental issues had
been brought to the public’s attention and have never
been forgotten.
The overarching theme of Silent Spring is the powerful
and often negative effects that humans have on
the natural world. The book closes with a call for a
biotic (that is, caused by living organisms) approach to
pest control as an alternative to chemical pesticides.
The book had a powerful impact on the environmental
movement of the 1960s and led to the creation of
the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) during the
Nixon Administration in 1970.
Carson’s Silent Spring has been featured in many
lists of the best nonfiction books of the 20th century,
“named one of the 25 greatest science books of all
time,” and “designated a National Historic Chemical
Landmark.” Naturalist David Attenborough has stated
that Silent Spring was probably the book that had
changed the scientific world the most, after On the
Origin of Species by Charles Darwin.
I was impressed by a couple of Carson’s remarks
taken from the acceptance speech for her National
Book Award for Nonfiction: “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 fic-
tion. It seems to me, then, that there can be no separate
literature of science….” And “The winds, the sea,
and the moving des 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…, it
is not because I deliberately placed it there, but because
no one could write truthfully about the sea and
leave out the poetry.”
RACHEL CARSON’S BOOKS DID
INDEED CHANGE THE WORLD!