Section III: Taking Action
Rachel Carson looking through a
microscope, 1951. Photograph by Shirley Briggs. Used by
permission of the Shirley Briggs Photographs and Papers in the
Lear/Carson Collection at Connecticut College
Library.
While working for the Fish and Wildlife Service from 1935 to
1952, Rachel Carson knew of the early studies of DDT's lasting
effects on the environment. She was familiar with pesticide
research at Patuxent, a governmental research refuge in Bowie,
Maryland. In 1945 she proposed an article to Reader's
Digest about the dangers of DDT. The article was turned
down.
What finally led Carson to take a larger role was a letter
from her friend, Olga Owens Huckins, in January 1958. She and
her husband owned a two-acre private bird sanctuary in Duxbury,
MA, which was hit in 1957 by pesticides sprayed by planes to
control mosquitoes. Because many of their birds died, an irate
Mrs. Huckins wrote a detailed letter to The Boston
Herald and sent a copy and a note to Rachel Carson.
Years later Carson wrote to Huckins saying that Huckins'
personal letter begging her to find someone in Washington who
could help had convinced Carson to write the book 1
Planning her next book to be about humans and ecology,
Rachel Carson began assembling background information which was
evidence of the dangers on the environment by man's use of
pesticides.
Still unconvinced as to whether or not to stop her other
work and campaign against the use of pesticides, Rachel Carson
became involved in another case. Prominent residents of Long
Island's Nassau and Suffolk counties, including Archibald B.
Roosevelt and ornithologist Robert Cushman Murphy, were suing
to exclude their lands from government DDT spraying to control
the gypsy moth. Because no one yet had sufficient evidence of
the relationship between spray planes and a poisoned
environment, and because federal and state agricultural
officials and the chemical industry were making a case for
spraying, no action was taken. Rachel Carson saw this case as a
classic example of citizens' right not to have their
environment poisoned. "She too saw that the struggle must be
more widely publicized; here an expert and respected writer
could be of immense help in alerting the public to the dangers
it faced."2
Her initial step was to write to E.B. White, a staff member
of The New Yorker who was concerned with America's
natural resources. She shared the Long Island case with him and
suggested that it would make a great article for The New
Yorker. White wrote back saying that he could not do it
and suggested that she should consider writing the article
herself.
Since White was not going to write an article, Carson made
up her mind. "No one else seemed to be in sight to take on the
job; certainly no one else with her qualifications--her
scientific background, her passionate love for the natural
world, and her stature in American letters." 3 She decided to write a brief
book and move on to other projects.
Notes
- 1.Graham, 17. (We have not used Rachel Carson's
exact words because Fran Collins, the Trustee of Rachel
Carson's estate, does not want any quotations from Carson to
appear on the WWW. You may read her exact words in the source
cited.)
- 2.Graham, 18.
- 3.Graham, 19.