Rachel loved to write. She wrote stories as a child, mostly about animals, and even had one published when she was a pre-teen. When she attended the Pennsylvania College for Women (now known as Chatham) her first major was English, because she intended to fulfill her first dream and become a writer. But Rachel's original love of nature also surfaced, and she changed her major to biology. She received her Master's Degree in Zoology in 1932. She attended a Summer course at the Marine Biological Laboratory, an international research and education center, and in the Fall began study in zoology and genetics at Johns Hopkins University, hoping to receive a Doctorate. But her family needed her. She returned home to care for her aging parents.
As the family's financial situation grew more dire, she took a position with the U.S. Bureau of Fisheries, writing radio copy for their weekly educational broadcasts - fifty-two seven minute programs that focused on aquatic life to generate public interest in marine biology and support for the Bureau's work. For the first time in her life, her two loves - the love of nature and the love of writing - combined with such power that her true life's course became powerfully clear to her. Pleased with her work, the Bureau hired her full-time as a Junior Aquatic Biologist, the second woman the Bureau had hired as a professional.
Now on fire, Rachel used her research and consultations with marine biologists to produce a steady stream of articles for "The Baltimore Sun." Then in 1937, another tragedy struck. Her older sister died, leaving her the sole breadwinner for her mother (her father had died) and her two young nieces. Continuing writing for several publications, she also, in the 1950's, produced a book trilogy, "The Sea Around Us" (winner of a U.S. National Book Award), "The Edge of the Sea," and "Under the Sea Wind," which together explore the whole of ocean life from the shores to the depths. The public responded enthusiastically to her winning way of translating scientific facts into a memorable poetic style, and all three books were best-sellers.
However, in 1945, Rachel had become aware of a revolutionary new pesticide, DDT, called "the insect bomb" after the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. No one had been aware of its impact on the environment. In the 1950's, as her concerns were turning to conservation and environmental protection, she began to hear the stirrings of concern over the environmental and human damage caused by the widespread aerial spraying of insecticides mixed with fuel oil. But, in 1957, tragedy struck again. One of her nieces died at the age of thirty-one, leaving a five year old orphan son. Rachel chose to adopt him, and took time to move the family to Silver Springs, Maryland.
Her mind, as she finessed the adoption and the move, kept turning to what she saw as huge, inescapable fact: the environment was seriously threatened as human beings, infatuated with scientific invention, were putting new products on the market, unaware or unconcerned with their environmental ramifications. Working for the conscious, managed, careful use of pesticides would become her new life's work.
For over four years, she steadfastly gathered examples of environmental damage attributed to DDT and other pesticides, preparing to write a book. She interviewed a multitude of scientists, including government scientists, who spoke of environmental and physiological damage caused by overuse of pesticides. She spoke to scientists at the National Cancer Institute, who were classifying many pesticides as carcinogens. She also continued to write articles: in 1959, she write a letter to the "Washington Post," attributing the recent decline in bird populations to pesticide overuse.
During her revision after revision of her new book, she was bedridden for weeks with a duodenal ulcer, and also had a mastectomy. She found out that her cancer had metastasized. She continued to work, weak from radiation treatments.
Finally in 1962, "Silent Spring" was published, the title a warning for what would happen to the natural world if human beings did not take responsibility for the world they had been given and with which they were totally interconnected. The book was a sensation, controversial. Her critics, foremost among them the chemical industry and their lobbyists, accused her of suggesting a complete elimination of pesticides, while she encouraged a responsible, managed use of chemicals, careful of their effect on the whole ecosystem. Her critics aggressively attacked her scientific credentials. She was dismissed as "an hysterical alarmist" and called "a communist" and "a fanatic defender of the cult of the balance of nature."
Rachel died of a heart attack in 1964. But her pioneering cause became known and embraced throughout the world; her work eventually led to the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency.
Her obituary noted
"On April 3, 1963, the Columbia Broadcasting System’s television series “C.B.S. Reports” presented the program “The Silent Spring of Rachel Carson.” In it, Miss Carson said: "It is the public that is being asked to assume the risks that the insect controllers calculate. The public must decide whether it wishes to continue on the present road, and it can do so only when in full possession of the facts.
“We still talk in terms of conquest. We still haven’t become mature enough to think of ourselves as only a tiny part of a vast and incredible universe. Man’s attitude toward nature is today critically important simply because we have now acquired a fateful power to alter and destroy nature.
"But man is a part of nature, and his war against nature is inevitably a war against himself. The rains have become an instrument to bring down from the atmosphere the deadly products of atomic explosions. Water, which is probably our most important natural resource, is now used and re-used with incredible recklessness.
“Now, I truly believe, that we in this generation, must come to terms with nature, and I think we’re challenged as mankind has never been challenged before to prove our maturity and our mastery, not of nature, but of ourselves.”
In 1980, she was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom" by President Jimmy Carter. In 1994, a new edition of "Silent Spring" was released with a Foreward by Vice President Al Gore.
Rachel Carson was a true prophet, who spoke out even though she suffered physically and emotionally, through lovingly bearing family responsibilities and being cruelly attacked for her courageous and lonely environmental stance. Her spiritual sense of human beings' responsibility to honor and preserve the life of the planet paved the way for Pope Francis' encyclical "Laudato Si," in which the Pope stresses
"Praise be to you, my Lord”. In the words of this beautiful canticle, Saint Francis of Assisi reminds us that our common home is like a sister with whom we share our life and a beautiful mother who opens her arms to embrace us. “Praise be to you, my Lord, through our Sister, Mother Earth, who sustains and governs us, and who produces various fruit with coloured flowers and herbs”.This sister now cries out to us because of the harm we have inflicted on her by our irresponsible use and abuse of the goods with which God has endowed her. We have come to see ourselves as her lords and masters, entitled to plunder her at will. The violence present in our hearts, wounded by sin, is also reflected in the symptoms of sickness evident in the soil, in the water, in the air and in all forms of life. This is why the earth herself, burdened and laid waste, is among the most abandoned and maltreated of our poor; she “groans in travail” (Rom 8:22). We have forgotten that we ourselves are dust of the earth (cf. Gen 2:7); our very bodies are made up of her elements, we breathe her air and we receive life and refreshment from her waters." (1-2)
As Edwina Gateley says so powerfully
"And you knew,
without any doubt -
in the tradition of
St. Francis, Hildegard,
Mechtild, Teilhard de Chardin,
Thomas Berry, and many more -
prophets and saints -
that the beauty of nature
all around us
was an essential part
of our spirituality
and a source of healing
for the human spirit......
You anguished, Rachel!
And you knew
that you could not keep silent.
As St. Catherine of Siena
proclaimed before you,
'It is silence. which kills the world.'
And so you spoke aloud -
a million words and more.
You declared
that we are all related.
When we poison nature,
we poison ourselves!"
( from "Mothers, Sisters, Daughters")
In these terrible days when truth is being attacked more than ever and the Environmental Protection Agency has been gutted, when the United States has forfeited its leadership in world environmental protection, and we draw ever nearer to a Real "Silent Spring" - St. Rachel, pray for us.