Rachel Carson, who was among the first conservation ecologists to capture the public’s attention in the late 1930s, is the animating presence of Douglas Brinkley’s new 600-page book documenting the rise of environmentalism. Here’s how her story begins.
Environmental Awakening BY DOUGLAS BRINKLEY
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ust twenty-five miles west of Hyannis Port, where the Kennedys and thousands of other families enjoyed the sail-dotted water along the coast, the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution was home to those fascinated with the world beneath the ocean surface. Established in 1930, Woods Hole operated beside the previously existing Marine Biological Laboratory and the Woods Hole Laboratory of the US Commission of Fish and Fisheries. Rachel Carson, who worked as an ocean science researcher at all three over the years, considered the coastal village of Woods Hole the most “delightful place” to “biologize.” During the summer of 1929, the trim and proper twenty-twoyear-old Carson was on a research fellowship at the MBL and living in a cottage run by the lab. Down a path from her quarters was the marvelous Nobska Point Light Station. On a clear day, she would sit there and gaze toward the vacation island of Martha’s Vineyard, watching sea ducks bob and collecting spine-studded urchins at the low-tide line. Migrating eels and bottom-dwelling mollusks became her primary interests that summer and later. Though Carson had never seen the ocean until that summer, she had read about the diverse animal societies to be found on shorelines. Chatting with conchologists or ichthyologists at the MBL was a thrill for the budding zoologist. Carson enthused that it “would be very easy to acquire the habit of coming back every summer” at Woods Hole, conducting marine experiments in the huge redbrick Crane Laboratory building and diving into books at the extensive oceanographic library. But those weren’t the only attractions. “To understand the shore, it is not enough to catalogue its life,” she wrote. “Understanding comes only when standing on a
beach, we can sense the long rhythms of earth and sea that sculptured its landforms and produced the rock and sand of which it is composed; when we can sense with the eye and ear of the mind the surge of life beating always at its shores—blindly, inexorably pressing for a foothold.” That summer Carson began a study of the cranial nerve in reptiles. If serious research at the MBL set her course professionally, long walks on the sand and swims in the waves gave her a life-affirming love of the sea. The two strains of Carson’s Woods Hole stint combined with her own inborn view of the world. To her, all of God’s creatures had a will to live and were worthy of compassion. Though not outwardly philosophical, she did believe that every person had to respectfully repay an eternal debt to nature. At a young age, she understood ecology as a basic notion: We live in the house of life, and all the rooms connect. A line by the English poet Francis Thompson nicely summed up her view: “Thou canst not stir a flower / Without troubling of a star.” ... As a “beginning investigator” of the Atlantic Ocean, [Carson] entered graduate school in zoology at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore on a one-year scholarship. Whenever possible, she worked to improve the flow and rhythm of her prose. After earning her master’s degree in 1932, she wrote articles about the Chesapeake Bay for the Baltimore Sun, focusing on mid-Atlantic fish and wildlife under headlines such as “It’ll Be Shad Time Soon” and “Chesapeake Eels Seek the Sargasso Sea.” Her Sun articles showcased her broad interest in progressive conservation writ large. However, freelancing for the newspaper, though satisfying, didn’t earn her much money to live on. After Carson’s father, Robert, died in 1935, she taught part-time at the University of Maryland and Johns Hopkins summer school. With him gone, there was little income with which to support her mother and herself. When Professor Skinker learned that Rachel was in a financial bind, she recommended applying to the Bureau of Fisheries in Washington, DC, which had recently undertaken a series of radio broadcasts entitled Romance Under the Sun. It needed a part-time biologist-type who could write. Carson recalled later, “I happened in one morning, when the chief of the biology division [Elmer Higgins] was feeling rather desperate—I think at that point he was having to write the scripts himself. He talked to me a few minutes and then said: ‘I’ve never seen a written word of yours, but I’m going to take a sporting chance.’ That little job, which eventually led to a permanent appointment as a biologist, was in its way, a turning point.” She was hired as a junior aquatic biologist in the Division of Scientific Inquiry, writing radio scripts about fish.
I L LUST R AT IONS BY W E SL E Y A L L SBRO OK MAGA ZINE.RICE.EDU
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