Rachel Carson and the Sea

The memorial near here honors Rachel Carson, the marine biologist and writer who, more than almost anyone in the twentieth century, taught Americans to think about the natural world as a single interconnected system.

Carson spent many summers on the coast of Maine, and her love for this shoreline shaped her writing profoundly. She wrote three books about the sea before she turned to the book that would make her famous and controversial. Silent Spring, published in nineteen sixty-two, documented how the widespread use of synthetic pesticides was moving invisibly through food chains, killing birds, contaminating water, and threatening human health. The chemical industry attacked her fiercely. But her evidence was meticulous, and the public listened. Silent Spring is widely credited with launching the modern environmental movement. The Environmental Protection Agency, created in nineteen seventy, owes a direct debt to her work. She died in nineteen sixty-four, just two years after the book came out, not long enough to see the full scope of the change she had set in motion.