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Abstract
The first publisher of Silent Spring reportedly said that Rachel Carson made concern about pesticides into “literature.” What keeps Silent Spring in print today is not the details of the science she includes, current in the mid twentieth century, but how she helps readers think about scientific issues as accessible and transformational for them. Carson was also bluntly candid when she needed to be: “A quarter century ago, cancer in children was considered a medical rarity. Today, more American school children die of cancer than from any other disease.” Carson could change tone, pace, and rhetorical strategies as needed, to make her arguments effective and memorable—and we can learn from that how to reach a general public now once more ignorant of danger surrounding them.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. Linda Lear, Rachel Carson: Witness for Nature (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1997/2009), 115.
2. Rachel Carson, Under the Sea-Wind: A Naturalist’s Picture of Ocean Life (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1941).
3. Lear, 114.
4. Carson, Under the Sea-Wind, 10. Linda Lear says, “Her voice is that of both scientist and poet” (104). Souder thinks she broke her vow not to metamorphosize (William Souder. On a Farther Shore: The Life and Legacy of Rachel Carson. New York: Broadway Books, 2012, 35.)
5. Lear, 112.
6. William Cronan, “The Trouble With Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature,” in W. Cronan, ed., Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature (London: Norton, 1996), 80; cited in Greg Garrard, Ecocriticsm (London: Routledge, 2012).
7. Paul Brooks, The House of Life: Rachel Carson at Work (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1972/1989), 128.
8. The term “humanism” is increasingly complicated in an anthropomorphic world. Humanism enshrines the human and indeed humans have a hard time thinking of themselves as anything but central and the top of species development on earth. But we now need a way to focus on the reality of earth’s interconnected systems and on ways other beings help keep that together, whereas we seem primarily keen to destroy that in the service of short-term comfort and safety. Environmental humanism needs to complicate humanism with environmental consciousness.
9. Ed Yong, An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us (New York: Random House, 2022). Ed Yong’s reportage on COVID won him a Pulitzer. His first book (I Contain Multitudes: The Microbes Within Us and a Grander View of Life [New York: Random House, 2022]) was a best seller. Like Carson, he seeks to persuade readers that knowing science is in their best interests, and like her, he makes the science accessible and writes in a memorable and interesting way.
10. Yong, An Immense World, 7.
11. Yong, An Immense World, 355.
12. Rachel Carson, Silent Spring (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1962/2002).
13. Paul Brooks, The House of Life: Rachel Carson at Work (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1972/1989), 3. Brooks reports that in Carson’s acceptance speech for the National Book Award, she said that once there is talent, “writing is largely a matter of application and hard work, of writing and rewriting endlessly until you are satisfied you have said what you want to say as clearly and simply as possible” (Brooks, 3).
14. Henry Williamson, Tarka the Otter (New York: New York Review of Books, 1927/2020).
15. Williamson, Tarka the Otter, 38.
16. Carson, Under the Sea-Wind. Rachel Carson, The Edge of the Sea (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1955/1998).
17. Rachel Carson, The Sea Around Us (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1950/2018).
18. Carson, Under the Sea-Wind, 32.
19. Carson, The Sea Around Us, 17.
20. Carson, The Edge of the Sea, 3.
21. Souder, note 4, 319.
22. Carson, Silent Spring, 221.
23. See Elizabeth Kolbert, Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future (New York: Random House, 2021); Kolbert, The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History (New York: Henry Holt, 2014). Jeff Goodell, The Heat Will Get You First: Life and Death on a Scorched Planet (Boston: Little, Brown, 2023); Goodell, The Water Will Come: Rising Seas, Sinking Cities and the Remaking of the Civilized World (Boston: Little, Brown, 2017).
24. Al Gore says “The Environmental Protection Agency was established in 1970, in large part because of the concerns and the consciousness that Rachel Carson raised,” in “Rachel Carson and Silent Spring,” in Peter Matthiessen, ed., Courage for the Earth: Writers, Scientists, and Activists Celebrate the Life and Writing of Rachel Carson (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2007), 63–78.
25. Douglas Brinkley, Silent Spring Revolution: John F. Kennedy, Rachel Carson, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, and the Great Environmental Awakening (New York: Harper Collins, 2022), 254.
26. Lear, 335–36.
27. Larry Nielsen, Nature’s Allies: Eight Conservationists Who Changed our World (Washington, DC: Island Press, 2017), 113.
28. Jim Lynch, “Rachel Carson in The Highest Tide,” in Peter Matthiessen, ed., Courage for the Earth: Writers, Scientists, and Activists Celebrate the Life and Writing of Rachel Carson (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2007), 37–48, 37.
29. Brinkley, 255.
30. Souder, 331.
31. Souder, 131.
32. Souder, 345–46, 358–61.
33. Nielsen, 98.
34. Souder, 24.
35. Lear, 12.
36. Souder, 27.
37. The poem is “La Belle Dame sans Merci,” which John Keats wrote in 1819. The choice of the epigraph was suggested by Carson’s agent Marie Rodell, and Carson had the good sense to see it worked (Brooks, 263).
38. Carson, Silent Spring, 53.
39. Carson, Silent Spring, 53.
40. Carson, Silent Spring, 53.
41. Carson, Silent Spring, 1.
42. Carson, Silent Spring, 3.
43. Carson, Silent Spring, 63.
44. Carson, Silent Spring, 64.
45. Carson, Silent Spring, 66.
46. Carson, Silent Spring, 64–65.
47. Carson, Silent Spring, 73.
48. Carson, Silent Spring, 3.
49. Carson, Silent Spring, 177.
50. Carson, Silent Spring, 277. The poem, beloved by many Americans of a certain generation and education, likely similar to her main audience, is “The Road Not Taken.”
51. Carson, Silent Spring, 293.
52. Carson, Silent Spring, 293.
53. Carson, Silent Spring, 71.
54. Souder, 67.
55. Souder, 77.
56. Edward O. Wilson, “Afterword,” in Rachel Carson, Silent Spring (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2002), 357–363, 358.
57. Mary Mellor, Feminism and Ecology (New York: New York University Press, 1997), 15.
58. Souder, 278.
59. This is from one of his most famous early poems, “West Street and Lepke.” Carson summons John Keats, Robert Frost, and Robert Lowell to her aid in Silent Spring, also indicating the kind of readership she anticipated.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Elaine Savory
Elaine Savory is an emeritus professor of literary studies and environmental studies at The New School, New York. Her research has been primarily in Caribbean and African literatures, especially women’s writing, poetry, drama, and theater.