Neptune's Needle

Writer and scientist, Rachel Carson was born in Springdale, Pennsylvania, the daughter of farmers and granddaughter of a Presbyterian minister, near Pittsburgh, two hundred miles from the sea. As a girl she persuaded her father to stop shooting rabbits. She wrote and published short stiries as a teenager. In 1925, age 18, she entered Pennsylavania State College, where she majored in biology. Upon graduation in 1929, she secured a summer job at the Marine Biological Laboratory at Woods Hole, Massachusetts, where she first encountered the sea. In the fall of 1929 she entered the Johns Hopkins University graduate program in biology. Ater two years at Hopkins, she took a part-time teaching job at the University of Maryland. Once she had her MA, she did not go on to a PhD, perhaps lacking the funds and/or discouraged by the job prospects of women PhDs.

In 1936 he secured a part-time position at the Bureau of Fisheries, in Baltimore. She was only the second woman hired by the Bureau for a staff position. The Bureau soon put her writing skills to use preparing radio scripts and press releases. She also began writing occasional pieces for the Baltimore Sun . In 1937 her boss urged her to revise a piece she had submitted to the Bureau for publication in the Atlantic Monthly. When the essay, "Undersea," was accepted by the magazine, an editor at Simon & Schuster, Quincy Howe, urged her to expand it into a book.This became Under the Sea Wind, , published in the fall of 1941. Although well received by several critics, it sold poorly.

By then, however, Carson had a full-time appointment in the newly named U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, where she worked as an editor and staff writer, not as a research biologist.She was only one of two women in the Bureau's professional employ. In 1949 she became the editor of all Fish and Wildlife Service publications. Meanwhile, she worked on a second book, which when published in 1951 as The Sea Around Us , was first serialized in the New Yorker,, winning her and her book national acclaim. The book became a best seller and led directly to a reissue of her early Beneath the Sea-Wind, which the second time round was another bestseller. Neither book contained new findings; both captivated readers at the same time they alerted them to the fragility of the marine environment. The modern conservation movement's marine phase may be said to have been launched by these two books.

Royalties allowed Carson to leave government service and to move to coastal Maine, where she worked on her third book, The Edge of the Sea published in 1955, again to critical and popular acclaim. It appeared the same year as Anne Morrow Lindbergh's more philosophical and personal Giift From the Sea, also a bestseller.

The last phase of Carson's career took her away from her lifelong and uncontroversial reflections on the marine environment and thrust her into the new role of agitator for the prohibition of DDT as a pesticide. She first took up the subject in earnest in the late 1940s and by 1958 was committed to alerting the American public to the hazards of this widely used pesticide. This placed her in the uncomfortable position of directly challenging the chemical industry, agribusiness and the federal government with troubling facts they were reluctant to have discussed. When magazines declined to accept articles she wrote on the subject, she decided to publish her views in a book. In 1962 Silent Spring appeared, delivering with uncharacteristic vehemence Carson's concerns about human tampering with the earth's fragile environment. Historians have since credited the book with a wave of ewnvironmental legislation at both the state and federal level in the late 1960s. But by then Carson was dead, having died in 1964 of cancer and heart failure at age 57.

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Peter Richards