Born: May 27, 1907 in Springdale, Pennsylvania
Died: April 14, 1964 in Silver Spring, Maryland
Books:
Under the Sea-Wind (1941)
The Sea Around Us (1951)
The Edge of the Sea (1955)
Silent Spring (1962)
The Sense of Wonder (posthumous, 1965)
Rachel Carson, (click here) writer, scientist, and ecologist, grew up simply in the rural river town of Springdale, Pennsylvania. Her mother bequeathed to her a life-long love of nature and the living world that Rachel expressed first as a writer and later as a student of marine biology. Carson graduated from Pennsylvania College for Women (now Chatham University) in 1929, studied at the Woods Hole Marine Biological Laboratory, and received her MA in zoology from Johns Hopkins University in 1932....
Rachel Cason was a woman employed by the US Bureau of Fisheries as a Marine Biologist and a graduate of John Hopkins University. She was unafraid of opinion and acted in a benevolent role in the USA to bring about awareness of an alarming truth she was witnessing in the waters and across the lands of the country she loved.
She was more than concerned regarding the outcomes of the country's natural resources. She was finding chorinatedhydrocarbons and organophosphates to be a danger to the country's lands and it's people.
She affiliated with a wildlife illustrator, Bob Hines, and the movement changed to an understanding by others. His influence would take place with illustrations of birds. His illustrations were wonderfully accurate valued by Audubon as well as USFWS (click here).
In her reality of the loss of wildlife was also the reality to Bob Hines the subject of his art was also in danger of disappearing. The cause of which became "Silent Spring" actually found these wonderful Americans. The overwhelming reality existed in order to have it manifest in their work.Their professional ethics came to bear, but, there was also a great ethics; the ethics of living and valuing life over all else.
It could be said Rachel Carson's career occurred at an incredible time of awareness. The American society realized it could accomplish anything, but, it was also still engaged in the 'ethics of morality' and how ambitions of wealth and power could destroy the very world it enjoyed to thrive within.
Her value of life and the beauty of the natural world she found herself as an expert brought forward a woman patient with the existence of corporate America, but, willing to put education of the public above the priority of 'profits first.' She believed Americans loved the land as well as the wealth of the country's potential. She also knew Americans had to find a moral content that would set aside wealth over life. Ultimately, Rachel Carson would succumb to cancer two years following the publication of Silent Spring; further testament of the reality she carried to Americans and asked them to hold as their own.
I don't know where it all got so lost in the USA. Rachel's value of life is the place where all countries belong. Life is important. The wealth of any one person or group of persons cannot be tolerated when it causes the loss of life of others. Today we face the challenge of the entire of humanity in realizing their precious Earth has lost it's balance. It is a new dynamic to countries used to commanding the land and it's occupation by citizens. Now, countries have to come to terms with their own vulnerability in ignoring a vital message that has been on going since the 1960s.
Rachel Carson lost her life while bringing forward her knowledge to empower Americans to take on the challenge of a morality which put profiteering on the back shelf to save their own lives. That challenge for Americans still exists today. If she were alive today, Rachel would carry the message the IPCC carries to all of us today, "We live on a planet far to challenged to maintain it's atmospheric balance and Earth's benevolence no longer exists. All countries need to pay attention to the future of Earth, but, those most responsible for past grievances need to carry the return to a balance of the atmospheric Earth."
