Rachel Carson: The World Around Us

So who was Rachel Carson? Rachel Carson was an environmentalist who saved hundreds of lives. She
released information about DDT, a pesticide that was killing species of birds and poisoning humans. It wasn’t
easy but in the end, people appreciated her for how she contributed to the environment.

Many of Rachel Carson’s younger experiences probably encouraged her career later in life. Rachel loved
to play in forests and explore nature. At her house, she had a big backyard full of leaves to play in, bugs to
examine, and sticks and stones to play with. This is most certainly why she decided to be an environmentalist.
She got her adventurous attitude from her mother, Maria Mclean. Rachel looked up to her mother and was very
close to her when she was growing up. Maria was also a well-known singer and musician, and before she was
married she worked as a school teacher. Although Rachel spent time outside because she loved the beauty of
nature, she most likely also played outside because the Carson family didn’t have a lot of money. They were quite
poor, without working electricity or plumbing in their house. We can also see why Rachel was so close to her
mother because her father, Robert Carson, was always absent due to his job as an insurance salesman.

After World War 2, life was easy for an average person. New transportations were out, such as new cars
and new buses. There were a lot more people in neighborhoods, and the economy was soaring. This was
excellent for someone living in the 1950s or 1960s. It was a great time to reveal what DDT was doing to the
environment because the 1950s were a definite time for new inventions and lots of innovation was happening.

Average people went to buy food at markets and stores. They mulled the shelves, choosing with much
focus what they wanted to eat. They chose the “freshest produce” and tried to eat from local farmers. In the
1940s and 1950s, there were a lot of newborns. There were probably mothers at the store buying the best quality
food for their babies and trying to keep them as healthy as possible, they just bought what looked like a healthy
option. The discovery that DDT was majorly harmful didn’t get around very well for defensive mothers who
thought that when it said organic on foods that it meant they were organic. Rachel Carson knew otherwise, as she
frequently visited farms and saw what they were spraying on foods. This might not make much sense to an
average person in the 40s and 50s, but I’ll try to explain to you. Throughout these times, organic produce was
getting more and more popular, as the rumors about global warming got more intense and that livestock was
making it worse.

As more and more people started not eating meat, they wanted organic produce to eat. This created a
shortage of fields to grow to produce, and soil to grow it in. After a while, what organic was supposed to mean,
was watered down, and now it was just a title that farms could label their products with. Of course, it’s okay to
find the diamond in the ruff, or finding actual organic foods, but it was hard in the 1940s and 50s and it is still, or
even more hard today.

DDT was a discovery that led to health in so many places, for so many species, and it was all in 1972. It
was because of her book, Silent Spring, which was published in 1962, 10 years before the EPA decided to ban DDT
from use in America. This was the year that the environment had a load taken off of it. The year that the
environment was saved from something dangerous, and destructive. But what was it that leaked wide-spread
panic to small towns and big cities in America? What was it that made people curious? How was it that it made
villagers and known farmers jump out of bed after reading something so influential, they were scared their food
was poisoned? They were scared that their workers were sick from seemingly harmless pesticide?
It started in the 1940s when Rachel Carson was still working at the US Fish and Wildlife Service. Rachel
Carson had proposed that DDT, a harmful chemical, be banned from America. She may have proposed this
because of the effects it had on the ocean and the overall oceanic environment. She learned about this at the US
Fish and Wildlife Service, and she even wrote a book about it. The ocean was always important to Rachel Carson.
She loved to study currents and waves.

DDT. What’s in it, why is it useful, and how was it used in the 1940s? In the form of a pesticide, Di-
chlorodiphenyl-tri-chloroethane, or more commonly known as DDT was proven effective to fight against insect-
borne diseases that humans get. This includes typhus, malaria, and a lot of others. Carson wrote to Reader’s
Digest about putting in an article about the effects that DDT has on the environment. The magazine prominently
denied that idea, as it wasn’t the protocol for their magazine and wasn’t an “issue”. Carson kept trying, but she
was put down every time she tried to talk about her opinion.

DDT was harmful to many species of birds who were sprayed and who ingested it. In 1963, when the
population of Bald Eagles was counted, there were less than 500. This was while DDT spraying was still in use of
big doses over farms and ran through rivers, eventually finding their way to animals and ultimately killing or
poisoning them. Once DDT got banned, more than 5,000 Bald Eagles were counted, which is a big
accomplishment. The same was done with peregrine falcons. In 1975 there were only 39 pairs of falcons. Then, in
1998, 993 pairs were found. This was incredible! DDT was doing so much evil in the world, and just getting rid of it
was making more species stay alive. In 1981, ospreys only had 8,000 breeding pairs. In 1994, there were 14,246.

In the 1940s, when this was a relatively new idea, everybody was writing on how absurd Rachel Carson’s
“conspiracies were.” Local newspapers talked about what she thought, and foreign agriculture journals made
segments about the demented woman, who thought that DDT, the pesticide that was helping their crops, was
hurting people and animals alike. How was it that this supposedly dangerous pesticide wasn’t helping, but it was
hurting? This was the question all were asking. This was the question that puzzled people. Why then, if someone
like Rachel Carson knew the answer, no one believed her? No one had heard any proof. It was all rumors. 13 years
later, in 1958, a friend that lived in Massachusetts told her that there were birds on Cape Cod that had died of
DDT. This shocked Carson, and she wanted to do something about this.

Carson faced a lot of hardships with spreading the word, but she knew that when the truth came out, all
of the doubters would eat crow. At one point, the William Darby of the Vanderbilt University School of Medicine
generalized her rudely as “An anti-fluoride, worshipper of natural foods, conspiracist scientist, looking for any
reason to destroy the world that has been so perfectly built on the American platform”. No matter how many
times any of those big companies tried to put her down and reject her new ideas, she never gave up. She never let
any of them discard her ideas, and she kept trying to bring justice to the environment.

One way that Rachel Carson could show people what was going on about DDT, was to write a book
about it. Rachel Carson decided to do just that. DDT had been in use since the 1940s, but, after Rachel Carson’s
book Silent Spring was published in the 1960s, and available for purchase, people got nervous about what their
food and water had inside of it. Her book about it was an immediate success! It was spreading like wildfire
throughout small villages and towns, hitting top purchases on local bookstores, and had a lot of buzz around
heavily agricultural-populated areas. This was an exciting day for Rachel Carson, and it was an exciting day for
the history of books, as this was an influential one. At last, the word had been spread and Silent Spring, (the book
that Rachel Carson wrote about this), was published. People were finally interested in what Rachel Carson had to
say about DDT.
Even after the hearings about DDT, people were skeptical about it. Though things were soon cleared up
when President Kennedy and a team of fact-checkers looked through the evidence that Rachel Carson provided.
This was all of the evidence on DDT and environmental studies. After looking through it, they released their
support in her work and research, clearing her finding as completely true.

I believe that Rachel Carson was a puzzler because she proposed new paradigms and tested them also.
She worked hard for the sake of her community, and I think that it was what she was all about. Rachel Carson
never really had an “aha” moment about what DDT was, but this worked to her advantage because more people
knew of DDT, they just didn’t know what it could do.

So obviously, Rachel Carson should be celebrated. She saved species from literally going extinct, and she
helped ones that were damaged from DDT, such as birds that had been damaged while in incubation from DDT.
The DDT had caused a thinning of the protective coating on eggshells, and many species of birds had been hurt.
Rachel Carson did research and eventually formed the paradigm that DDT had done this. Rachel Carson would
have only been able to do some of these experiments if she hadn’t been at the United States Fish and Wildlife
Service. I think that her traits were what made her so confident in her discovery because she never gave up.

References:

https://www.rachelcarson.org/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rachel_Carson

https://www.womenshistory.org/education-resources/biographies/rachel-carson

https://www.fws.gov/refuge/Rachel_Carson/about/rachelcarson.html

About DDT

https://www.panna.org/resources/ddt-story