Rachel Carson - Printable Version +- cloven hooves (https://clovenhooves.org) +-- Forum: Celebrate Women! (https://clovenhooves.org/forumdisplay.php?fid=40) +--- Forum: Women in STEM (https://clovenhooves.org/forumdisplay.php?fid=43) +--- Thread: Rachel Carson (/showthread.php?tid=287)

Rachel Carson - unconditional - Oct 13 2024 Hi all,  I wanted to make a post to celebrate Rachel Carson, my environmental activist inspiration!  Rachel Carson was an aquatic biologist for the US Fish and Wildlife Service and published her best-selling book, The Sea Around Us, in 1951. The Sea Around Us is a beautifully written history of oceanography that presents the natural world like a fantasy story, bringing knowledge about the ocean to a wider audience than just scientists. Her being a woman and writing in simple but engaging terms made her writing perfect for women's book clubs of her day. The Sea Around Us is one of three books Rachel Carson published about the ocean, often called the sea trilogy.  In 1962, Rachel Carson published Silent Spring, another similarly written book, but this time about the conservation of land animals. In the late 1950s, Rachel Carson became concerned about the negative impacts of DDT on the environment. The name of the book came from the threat that if pesticides containing DDT continued to be used, no birds would survive to sing in the springtime. Those who worked for chemical companies that produced pesticides with DDT told the public that Rachel Carson was not to be trusted, and that because she was childless she had no right to worry about the future of our world. While her opposition was fierce, Rachel Carson was equally fierce in getting her message out to the public. When her book was banned, she published it in small articles in newspapers and magazines that would allow her to. The trailer for an amazing documentary about Silent Spring can be found here. Silent Spring, alongside Rachel Carson's other work, interviews, and articles, led to a nationwide ban on DDT. Rachel Carson died due to complications from breast cancer treatment in 1964. She fought until the very end of her life for environmentalism and to spread her message to the world. With the knowledge that she would die of her illness, she sacrificed all of the life she had left to save our world. Her work led to the creation of the EPA and she is credited as one of the inspirations for the environmental movement as a whole. Her stories and her struggles are documented in over 900 letters to her best friend, Dorothy Freeman, some of which are shared in a 1995 book, Always, Rachel.  I would highly recommend reading Silent Spring and The Sea Around Us if you haven't already. These books brought science to a wider audience of women at a time when it was still extremely difficult to do so and they are amazing pieces of history. If it had not been for Rachel Carson's work, there's no telling what our world would look like today or what living things would still be left in it. There is so much more about her that I love and could share, but this post is already long.  Please, if you are interested in women in science or environmentalism and have not already read her work, do yourself a favor, you will not be sorry.