February 13, 2025 • 11 mins
Marine biologist Rachel Carson published lots of books about the environment, but her investigation of DDT, 'Silent Spring', cracked open the insecticide industry. Learn about her life and work in today's episode of BrainStuff, based on this article: https://science.howstuffworks.com/dictionary/famous-scientists/biologists/10-things-should-know-about-rachel-carson.htm
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Brainstey, a production of iHeartRadio, Hey Rain staff
Lauren Bolbebaum. Here. In nineteen sixty three, an hour long
documentary aired on the television program CBS Reports. In it,
a serene, articulate, middle aged woman sat in her den
and proposed that it might not be such a good
(00:24):
idea to spray nine hundred million pounds of an insecticide
called DDT on crops, roadsides, and lawns across the country
every year. She pointed out that nobody knew what the
long term consequences might be for humans or other animals.
She was the American marine biologist and conservationist Rachel Carson,
(00:44):
who had just published the book Silent Spring, a work
of investigative science that helped start the environmental movement in
the United States. Offering an opposing point of view in
the documentary was a spokesperson from the chemical company American
Synamid by the name of Robert White Stevens. Clad in
a lab coat and sporting thick, black rimmed glasses, he
(01:05):
said that Carson was wrong, that smart scientists knew better,
and that man was well on the road to mastering
nature with chemicals like this. Rachel Carson was a country girl.
She was born on May twenty seventh of nineteen oh
seven in Springdale, Pennsylvania, where she grew up on a
sixty acre farm that's about twenty four hectares. There, she
(01:28):
wandered the fields, attesting her knowledge of the animal calls
and plants her mother taught her to identify. Life wasn't
that far from the scenes described in her favorite books
like The Wind in the Willows and Everything by Beatrix Potter.
But the farm wasn't doing well financially, and to make
ends meet, her father sold off parcels of land to
developers little by little, and so urbanity began to creep
(01:52):
into Carson's life. As streets and shops moved ever closer,
she witnessed an ecological shift. When Carson was young, she
read and wrote, often composing short prose pieces and essays.
She would later say that she couldn't remember a time
when she didn't know she was going to be a writer.
By the age of ten, she was already published. Her
(02:12):
work was accepted in Saint Nicholas, a magazine for children
that had previously printed the childhood works of f. Scott
Fitzgerald and William Faulkner, so it's no surprise that when
she went to college she majored in English, but part
way through her studies she took a biology class and
became so enamored with her professor, One Mary Scott Skinker,
(02:33):
that Carson switched majors and landed a summer internship working
with Skinker at the US Marine Laboratory in Massachusetts. That
was her first encounter with the ocean, and it was momentous.
Although she's best known for Silent Spring, a, Carson's lifelong
passion and the subject of most of her work was
the ocean. After receiving her BA, she enrolled in Johns
(02:57):
Hopkins in nineteen twenty nine, where she completed her masters
and zoology, and eventually began a PhD program in nineteen
thirty two to study marine biology. But the Great Depression
changed things. While she was working on her doctorate, her
family moved in with her. Working as a lab assistant
and teacher, Carson was a sole breadwinner in the house,
(03:17):
supporting not only her mother and father, but also one
of her sisters and two nieces. Under severe financial pressure,
Carson had to quit her doctoral program and get a
job to support her family. It was nineteen thirty five
and President Franklin Roosevelt had expanded the number of government
jobs to help dig the country out of the depression.
The Carson sat the Civil Service exam and aiced it.
(03:39):
She outperformed every other applicant. With her background in marine biology,
she was soon employed by the US Bureau of Fisheries
later the Department of Fish and Wildlife as an aquatic biologist.
She was the second woman ever hired by that agency.
Much of her work at the Bureau involved research and writing.
(04:00):
During World War II, Carson was part of a team
investigating the nature of underwater sounds and terrain to help
the Navy with the development of its submarine program. She
also authored pamphlets targeted at housewives, providing information on how
to best cook fish but given wartime meat rationing. But
when in the midst of all of this she submitted
(04:21):
to her boss an eleven page essay about marine life,
he told her it was too good for government publication
and urged her to submit it to magazines instead. Her
essay under Sea appeared in Atlantic Magazine in nineteen thirty
seven and is considered the piece that launched her career
as a naturalist. Encouraged by the success, Carson began a book,
(04:42):
which she wrote on the back of Fish and Wildlife
Service stationery. It was published in nineteen forty one as
Under the Sea Wind, but the timing was unfortunate, as
a few weeks later the US entered World War II.
After a stall in her writing career, The New Yorker
published what would become her second book, The Sea Around Us,
in serial in nineteen fifty one. When it came out
(05:04):
in book form, it spent eighty six weeks on the
New York Times bestseller list and won the National Book Award.
After the success, Carson resigned from the US Fish and
Wildlife Service to pursue writing full time. By nineteen fifty two,
she had received a Guggenheim Fellowship, which, combined with her
book's royalties, enabled her to buy a small patch of
land on the coast of Maine in nineteen fifty three.
(05:28):
There she devoted herself to writing full time. In nineteen
fifty five, she published The Edge of the Sea, another bestseller.
By this time, her nieces were grown and her mother, Maria,
lived with her. Carson never married, nor did she show
signs of a romantic interest in Men, but after her
move to Maine, she met a woman named Dorothy Freeman.
(05:50):
It was the beginning of a passionate but almost entirely
secret love affair to the outside world. The two women
were close friends, but Freeman was married with Chill Ldren
and strove to hide the nature of their relationship, and
at the time in the nineteen fifties, the American government
had labeled homosexuality as a mental illness. Carson and Freeman
(06:12):
conducted much of their relationship via letters. To safeguard their secret,
they would often enclose two letters in a single envelope.
One letter was for public consumption and could be read
aloud to family and friends. The other was private and passionate.
The private letters, they agreed were to be consigned to
the strong box, which was their code for burning. They
(06:34):
couldn't bring themselves to burn all of the private letters, though,
and in nineteen ninety five, Freeman's granddaughter published the surviving
ones in a book about the two women's relationship. Meanwhile,
the insecticide DDT was developed in the nineteen forties. It
was first used in wartime to help control the spread
of malaria, typhus, and other diseases. Transmitted by insects, but
(06:58):
with the end of World War II, the manufacturers sought
commercial uses for the substance. DDT was remarkably successful at
keeping insect pests out of crops and gardens, but it
wasn't clear what the effects might be on other organisms,
including beneficial insects like bees, other wildlife than animals up
the food chain, including humans. Some scientists raised alarms as
(07:22):
early as the nineteen forties, but they largely went unheeded
in the name of progress and profit. As an employee
of the Fish and Wildlife Service, Carson had read government
reports on DDT, how it hadn't been tested for civilian use,
and how it was killing wildlife. She proposed an article
on the subject to Reader's Digest, but they rejected the pitch.
(07:46):
Carson returned her attention to the sea, but she kept
her eye on the slowly mounting evidence that DDT might
not be the miracle chemical people had hoped for. Then,
in nineteen fifty eight, a citizens group called the Committee
adaninst Mass Poisoning filed a lawsuit in New York State
trying to stop the aerial spraying of insecticides. A member
(08:07):
of the committee contacted Carson to urge her to write
about the suit. A Carson was reluctant at first. It
would entail leaving Maine for New York, and she had responsibilities.
One of her two nieces had died young, orphaning a
boy named Roger, who Carson then adopted, and Carson was
also beginning what would be a long and painful struggle
(08:27):
with breast cancer. Nevertheless, the more she looked into DDT,
the more convinced she became that she had to write
about it. She asked colleagues to follow the New York
trial while she remained at home and began her research.
It was the inception of what would become Silent Spring,
which The New Yorker serialized in nineteen sixty two. It
(08:49):
was an immediate sensation. Esteemed author E. B. White declared
it one of the best and most important pieces ever
published in the magazine. When it came out as a book,
it shot to the top of the best list and
instigated a national debate about the dangers of pesticides. President
John F. Kennedy ordered an investigation, citing Carson's book as
(09:09):
an important factor. Vested interests, particularly companies that manufactured products
like DDT went into attack mode, doing their best to
discredit Carson as an amateur, an alarmist, a communist, and
insult of insults unwomanly. But she remained strong and spirited
and continued to speak out against what she rightly believed
(09:31):
was a threat, and all the while still privately battling
breast cancer. When she testified before Congress and did the
interview for that documentary, she wore whigs to cover her
hair loss from radiation treatments, to the chagrin of her detractors.
Carson's conclusions were backed up by the findings of President
(09:51):
Kennedy's Science Advisory Committee report. As a result, the use
of DDT and other pesticides was heavily regulated. The Silent
Spring is widely credited with having sparked the modern environmental
movement and lead the foundation for creating the US Environmental
Protection Agency, but most of that happened later in the
(10:12):
nineteen seventies. Just two years after Silent Spring, in nineteen
sixty four, Carson died of metastatic breast cancer. She was
only fifty six years old. She had worked through incredible
illness to complete the book, and her partner, Freeman, would
later maintain that silent Spring had killed her. But before
(10:33):
she died, Carson wrote that she was thinking about her
next book. It was going to be about the mysterious
rise in sea levels. If only she had lived. Given
the extraordinary influence of silent Spring, it's hard not to
think that Rachel Carson might have been able to publicize
the dangers of climate change decades before it became a
global concern. President Jimmy Carter honored Carson posthumously in nineteen
(10:58):
eighty with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian
award in the United States. President Carter said, a biologist
with a gentle, clear voice, she welcomed her audiences to
her love of the sea. A while with an equally
determined voice, she warned Americans with the dangers human beings
themselves pose for their own environment. Today's episode is based
(11:25):
on the article ten things you Should Know about Rachel
Carson on HowStuffWorks dot Com, written by Osene Kuran. Brainstuff
is production of by Heart Radio in partnership with how
Stuffworks dot Com and is produced by Tyler Klang. Four
more podcasts my Heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows,
Welcome to Brainstey, a production of iHeartRadio, Hey Rain staff
Lauren Bolbebaum. Here. In nineteen sixty three, an hour long
documentary aired on the television program CBS Reports. In it,
a serene, articulate, middle aged woman sat in her den
and proposed that it might not be such a good
(00:24):
idea to spray nine hundred million pounds of an insecticide
called DDT on crops, roadsides, and lawns across the country
every year. She pointed out that nobody knew what the
long term consequences might be for humans or other animals.
She was the American marine biologist and conservationist Rachel Carson,
(00:44):
who had just published the book Silent Spring, a work
of investigative science that helped start the environmental movement in
the United States. Offering an opposing point of view in
the documentary was a spokesperson from the chemical company American
Synamid by the name of Robert White Stevens. Clad in
a lab coat and sporting thick, black rimmed glasses, he
(01:05):
said that Carson was wrong, that smart scientists knew better,
and that man was well on the road to mastering
nature with chemicals like this. Rachel Carson was a country girl.
She was born on May twenty seventh of nineteen oh
seven in Springdale, Pennsylvania, where she grew up on a
sixty acre farm that's about twenty four hectares. There, she
(01:28):
wandered the fields, attesting her knowledge of the animal calls
and plants her mother taught her to identify. Life wasn't
that far from the scenes described in her favorite books
like The Wind in the Willows and Everything by Beatrix Potter.
But the farm wasn't doing well financially, and to make
ends meet, her father sold off parcels of land to
developers little by little, and so urbanity began to creep
(01:52):
into Carson's life. As streets and shops moved ever closer,
she witnessed an ecological shift. When Carson was young, she
read and wrote, often composing short prose pieces and essays.
She would later say that she couldn't remember a time
when she didn't know she was going to be a writer.
By the age of ten, she was already published. Her
(02:12):
work was accepted in Saint Nicholas, a magazine for children
that had previously printed the childhood works of f. Scott
Fitzgerald and William Faulkner, so it's no surprise that when
she went to college she majored in English, but part
way through her studies she took a biology class and
became so enamored with her professor, One Mary Scott Skinker,
(02:33):
that Carson switched majors and landed a summer internship working
with Skinker at the US Marine Laboratory in Massachusetts. That
was her first encounter with the ocean, and it was momentous.
Although she's best known for Silent Spring, a, Carson's lifelong
passion and the subject of most of her work was
the ocean. After receiving her BA, she enrolled in Johns
(02:57):
Hopkins in nineteen twenty nine, where she completed her masters
and zoology, and eventually began a PhD program in nineteen
thirty two to study marine biology. But the Great Depression
changed things. While she was working on her doctorate, her
family moved in with her. Working as a lab assistant
and teacher, Carson was a sole breadwinner in the house,
(03:17):
supporting not only her mother and father, but also one
of her sisters and two nieces. Under severe financial pressure,
Carson had to quit her doctoral program and get a
job to support her family. It was nineteen thirty five
and President Franklin Roosevelt had expanded the number of government
jobs to help dig the country out of the depression.
The Carson sat the Civil Service exam and aiced it.
(03:39):
She outperformed every other applicant. With her background in marine biology,
she was soon employed by the US Bureau of Fisheries
later the Department of Fish and Wildlife as an aquatic biologist.
She was the second woman ever hired by that agency.
Much of her work at the Bureau involved research and writing.
(04:00):
During World War II, Carson was part of a team
investigating the nature of underwater sounds and terrain to help
the Navy with the development of its submarine program. She
also authored pamphlets targeted at housewives, providing information on how
to best cook fish but given wartime meat rationing. But
when in the midst of all of this she submitted
(04:21):
to her boss an eleven page essay about marine life,
he told her it was too good for government publication
and urged her to submit it to magazines instead. Her
essay under Sea appeared in Atlantic Magazine in nineteen thirty
seven and is considered the piece that launched her career
as a naturalist. Encouraged by the success, Carson began a book,
(04:42):
which she wrote on the back of Fish and Wildlife
Service stationery. It was published in nineteen forty one as
Under the Sea Wind, but the timing was unfortunate, as
a few weeks later the US entered World War II.
After a stall in her writing career, The New Yorker
published what would become her second book, The Sea Around Us,
in serial in nineteen fifty one. When it came out
(05:04):
in book form, it spent eighty six weeks on the
New York Times bestseller list and won the National Book Award.
After the success, Carson resigned from the US Fish and
Wildlife Service to pursue writing full time. By nineteen fifty two,
she had received a Guggenheim Fellowship, which, combined with her
book's royalties, enabled her to buy a small patch of
land on the coast of Maine in nineteen fifty three.
(05:28):
There she devoted herself to writing full time. In nineteen
fifty five, she published The Edge of the Sea, another bestseller.
By this time, her nieces were grown and her mother, Maria,
lived with her. Carson never married, nor did she show
signs of a romantic interest in Men, but after her
move to Maine, she met a woman named Dorothy Freeman.
(05:50):
It was the beginning of a passionate but almost entirely
secret love affair to the outside world. The two women
were close friends, but Freeman was married with Chill Ldren
and strove to hide the nature of their relationship, and
at the time in the nineteen fifties, the American government
had labeled homosexuality as a mental illness. Carson and Freeman
(06:12):
conducted much of their relationship via letters. To safeguard their secret,
they would often enclose two letters in a single envelope.
One letter was for public consumption and could be read
aloud to family and friends. The other was private and passionate.
The private letters, they agreed were to be consigned to
the strong box, which was their code for burning. They
(06:34):
couldn't bring themselves to burn all of the private letters, though,
and in nineteen ninety five, Freeman's granddaughter published the surviving
ones in a book about the two women's relationship. Meanwhile,
the insecticide DDT was developed in the nineteen forties. It
was first used in wartime to help control the spread
of malaria, typhus, and other diseases. Transmitted by insects, but
(06:58):
with the end of World War II, the manufacturers sought
commercial uses for the substance. DDT was remarkably successful at
keeping insect pests out of crops and gardens, but it
wasn't clear what the effects might be on other organisms,
including beneficial insects like bees, other wildlife than animals up
the food chain, including humans. Some scientists raised alarms as
(07:22):
early as the nineteen forties, but they largely went unheeded
in the name of progress and profit. As an employee
of the Fish and Wildlife Service, Carson had read government
reports on DDT, how it hadn't been tested for civilian use,
and how it was killing wildlife. She proposed an article
on the subject to Reader's Digest, but they rejected the pitch.
(07:46):
Carson returned her attention to the sea, but she kept
her eye on the slowly mounting evidence that DDT might
not be the miracle chemical people had hoped for. Then,
in nineteen fifty eight, a citizens group called the Committee
adaninst Mass Poisoning filed a lawsuit in New York State
trying to stop the aerial spraying of insecticides. A member
(08:07):
of the committee contacted Carson to urge her to write
about the suit. A Carson was reluctant at first. It
would entail leaving Maine for New York, and she had responsibilities.
One of her two nieces had died young, orphaning a
boy named Roger, who Carson then adopted, and Carson was
also beginning what would be a long and painful struggle
(08:27):
with breast cancer. Nevertheless, the more she looked into DDT,
the more convinced she became that she had to write
about it. She asked colleagues to follow the New York
trial while she remained at home and began her research.
It was the inception of what would become Silent Spring,
which The New Yorker serialized in nineteen sixty two. It
(08:49):
was an immediate sensation. Esteemed author E. B. White declared
it one of the best and most important pieces ever
published in the magazine. When it came out as a book,
it shot to the top of the best list and
instigated a national debate about the dangers of pesticides. President
John F. Kennedy ordered an investigation, citing Carson's book as
(09:09):
an important factor. Vested interests, particularly companies that manufactured products
like DDT went into attack mode, doing their best to
discredit Carson as an amateur, an alarmist, a communist, and
insult of insults unwomanly. But she remained strong and spirited
and continued to speak out against what she rightly believed
(09:31):
was a threat, and all the while still privately battling
breast cancer. When she testified before Congress and did the
interview for that documentary, she wore whigs to cover her
hair loss from radiation treatments, to the chagrin of her detractors.
Carson's conclusions were backed up by the findings of President
(09:51):
Kennedy's Science Advisory Committee report. As a result, the use
of DDT and other pesticides was heavily regulated. The Silent
Spring is widely credited with having sparked the modern environmental
movement and lead the foundation for creating the US Environmental
Protection Agency, but most of that happened later in the
(10:12):
nineteen seventies. Just two years after Silent Spring, in nineteen
sixty four, Carson died of metastatic breast cancer. She was
only fifty six years old. She had worked through incredible
illness to complete the book, and her partner, Freeman, would
later maintain that silent Spring had killed her. But before
(10:33):
she died, Carson wrote that she was thinking about her
next book. It was going to be about the mysterious
rise in sea levels. If only she had lived. Given
the extraordinary influence of silent Spring, it's hard not to
think that Rachel Carson might have been able to publicize
the dangers of climate change decades before it became a
global concern. President Jimmy Carter honored Carson posthumously in nineteen
(10:58):
eighty with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian
award in the United States. President Carter said, a biologist
with a gentle, clear voice, she welcomed her audiences to
her love of the sea. A while with an equally
determined voice, she warned Americans with the dangers human beings
themselves pose for their own environment. Today's episode is based
(11:25):
on the article ten things you Should Know about Rachel
Carson on HowStuffWorks dot Com, written by Osene Kuran. Brainstuff
is production of by Heart Radio in partnership with how
Stuffworks dot Com and is produced by Tyler Klang. Four
more podcasts my Heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows,
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