Opinion: Rachel Carson, Ecology pioneer

During Women’s History Month, I think it’s important to pay homage to the woman who raised our consciousness about the challenges that modern society has been presenting to our environment. Rachel Carson was born in 1907 on a small farm in Springdale, PA. In 1925, she gained admittance to Pennsylvania College for Women, where she initially majored in English. However, she switched to biology in 1928 and entered Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, where she earned her master’s degree in zoology. She began work on a doctorate, but had to leave graduate school to get a job and help her family weather the Great Depression.

Career

With help from her mentor at Johns Hopkins, she obtained a position with the U.S. Bureau of Fisheries, where she wrote copy for a series of weekly broadcasts that focused on aquatic life. In 1936, she became an aquatic biologist for the Bureau. After she wrote “The World of Waters” for the Atlantic Monthly magazine, she was contacted by Simon & Schuster, a prestigious publishing house, to expand her essay into a book. The result was “Under the Sea Wind,” published in 1941.

In 1945, Carson encountered DDT, a revolutionary pesticide, that was pegged as the “insect bomb,” a reminder of the deadly effects of the atomic bombs that had been dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki to bring an end to World War II. Through the 1940s and 1950s, Carson became well known within the scientific community for her writing about the environment, with some of her works resulting in filmed documentaries. However, she had not yet focused on the deadly effects of DDT to all life forms.