If you haven’t seen Bryan Pfiefer’s Chasing Nature newsletter, I hope you will visit his site. His recent post about Rachel Carson and the salt marsh was intriguing. Pfifer visited the spot where Carson frequently sought inspiration while writing The Edge of the Sea, the third book in her trilogy of sea stories. Carson wrote so persuasively that some of her work contributed to nature films about the sea.
That trilogy preceded Silent Spring, the blockbuster nonfiction book that continues to sell several thousand copies per year. It took Carson’s three previous books out of the spotlight.
The following text is revised from an article I wrote for The Hellbender Press of Knoxville, Tennessee in 2005:
“For many years public-spirited citizens throughout the country have been working for the conservation of natural resources, realizing their vital importance to the Nation. Apparently, their hard-won progress is to be wiped out, as a politically minded Administration returns us to the dark ages of unrestrained exploitation and destruction.
It is one of the ironies of our time that, while concentrating on the defense of our country against enemies from without, we should be so heedless of those who would destroy it from within.” (The Lost Woods, P. 100)
The above paragraphs sound as though they could have been written this year. They are from a letter to the editor of the Washington Post written by Rachel Carson in 1952. This letter appears with articles, speeches, correspondence, and other short works collected in Lost Woods: The Discovered Works of Rachel Carson (Linda Lear, editor).
Miss Carson wrote those words to protest the dismissal of Mr. Albert Day, director of the US Fish and Wildlife Service, by then Secretary of the Interior Douglas McKay, a political appointee of the Eisenhower administration. At the time, she could not have imagined that she would fight her own battle against the forces of the agricultural pesticide industry ten years later.
Miss Carson waged her battle over the publication of her book Silent Spring, which alerted the public to the dangers of the indiscriminate use of pesticides. As Carson sounded her clarion call, executives of the pesticide industry, assisted by their allies in politics and government, launched a relentless attack on her book and reputation. Carson did not shrink from the battle, and her book continues to sell 25,000 copies per year.
Tucson author Reed Karaim countered many criticisms in his article “Not so Fast with the DDT: Rachel Carson’s Warnings Still Apply” (The American Scholar, Volume 74, issue 3). The same issue includes an excellent biographical sketch of Rachel Carson, “Turning the Tide: How Rachel Carson Became a Woman of Letters.” Author William Louis Howarth draws heavily on the letters of Rachel Carson and Dorothy Freeman, published in the book, Always, Rachel (Beacon Press, Boston).
In the debates over DDT and pesticide use, it is easy to lose track of the writer, Rachel Carson, and her lyric voice. In 1952, even as she protested Mr. Day’s dismissal in her letter to the editor, Miss Carson resigned from her position at US Fish and Wildlife. Her book, The Sea Around Us, had just been published, and the income that it generated provided her with the opportunity to become a full-time writer.
In the aftermath of the success of The Sea Around Us, Carson’s earlier book, Under the Sea Wind was given a second release and met with great success as well. This was followed in 1955 with her third work The Edge of the Sea. These three books served to popularize the science of oceanography in the minds of the American public. Carson’s lyrical prose makes any of the three well worth the read.
When Miss Carson died of cancer in 1964, her work was just beginning. She had defended Silent Spring against the critics, brought the question of pesticide use to the attention of many supporters, including President Kennedy, and was planning ten more books.
These books were not to be completed, although parts of one of them appeared in The Sense of Wonder, published posthumously. This wondrous book is the story of her explorations of the natural areas around her summer home with her nephew, Roger Christie, whom she adopted when he was five years old. The work began as a magazine article, “Help Your Child to Wonder,” published in The Women’s Home Companion.
The following passage from The Edge of the Sea illustrates the lyric nature of Miss Carson’s work:
“Now I hear the sea sounds around me, the night high tide is rising, swirling with a confused rush of waters from the open sea, and it lies over water and over the land’s edge, seeping into the spruces and stealing softly among the Juniper and the bayberry. The restive waters, the cold wet breath of the fog, are of a world in which man is an uneasy trespasser; he punctuates the night with the complaining groan and grunt of a foghorn, sensing the power and menace of the sea.
Hearing the rising tide, I think how it is pressing also against other shores I know – rising on a southern beach where there is no fog, but a moon edging all the waves with silver and touching the wet sands with lambent sheen, and on a still more distant shore sending its streaming currents against the moonlit pinnacles and the dark caves of the coral rock.”
Nearly twenty years later, I now realize that I wrote the article to counter another round of attacks on Carson, but did not present a direct approach that would point out the failings of her attackers. Those attacks continue today, often including false statements about her credentials. Linda Lear, editor of The Lost Woods, also wrote a first-class biography, Rachel Carson: Witness for Nature. Lear also developed an excellent website that provides a nice counterpoint to the attacks. This information is important to remember when facing Carson’s critics. She had an MA in Zoology from Johns Hopkins University. She conducted research at the Woods Hole Marine Biological Laboratory and later served on its board of directors. She supervised all publications at the US Department of Fish and Wildlife. The Town of Woods Hole, Massachusetts erected a statue in her honor in 2013. Her credibility is only questioned by people with an agenda.
Here is a link to Bryan Pfieffer’s article.
Apparently, this post got someone’s attention. The second post on my website https://rayzimmermanauthor.com has been spammed with irrelevant content in the comments section.
For a good laugh, visit the site and click on The Rains Come in the menu. Scroll down to the post titled Upcoming Events. I turned it into a marketing opportunity. If someone hands you a lemon, make lemonade. https://www.rayzimmermanauthor.com/the-rains-come/coming-events2027184#comments.
I remember Rachel.