Yikes, this is a busy time to work in a few blogs alongside that Christmas thing. I am finishing up William Souder's remarkable biography of the woman who was arguably the founder of the environmental movement and I thought I would share how good it is.
On a Farther Shore: The Life and Legacy of Rachel Carson is about 500 pages long, including the footnotes but I have found it an insightful and inspiring read. Carson is best known for Silent Spring, published fifty years ago. But she was already an established and popular author when it was released, having sold millions of copies of her other books about the sea and the way its complex ecosystems work.
Souder helps us see that Carson was aware of climate change sixty years ago, and understood that tampering with the web of life affected all the organisms within it. This is commonly accepted today but wasn't appreciated by many of her contemporaries.
Carson knew that Silent Spring would be a different book from her others, a polemic against chemical toxins such as DDT which would incur the wrath of the companies that produced them, as well as some members of the scientific community. She was labelled a communist, an hysterical woman, a spinster, a poor scientist. The offended companies, such as Dow, threatened to sue her and her publisher, but they never did, because she was accurate with her research.
I hadn't realized that the scientist who invented DDT was awarded the Nobel Prize for Science because initially it was believed that it was not toxic to humans, mammals or birds and was a sort of Wonder Pesticide. In the end it was shown that DDT and others in this family of toxins poison everything. The photo of children playing on a beach being fogged wtih DDT makes me shudder.
Carson was secretive about the cancer which made writing Silent Spring a challenge, and she died not long after its publication. She did live to enjoythe book's success.I admire her resolve and ability to rise above conventional wisdom to offer something new and world-changing. As I have said before, that's what prophetic figures do, including the great leaders of religions.
Do you know much about Rachel Carson? Were you aware of how
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