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