Courage For The Earth: Writers, Scientists, and Activists Celebrate the Life and Writing of Rachel Carson - Softcover

Matthiessen, Peter

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0618872760 ISBN 13: 9780618872763

Publisher: Harper Paperbacks, 2007

Synopsis

For environmentally critical times Courage for the Earth is a centennial appreciation of Rachel Carson s brave life and transformative writing Rachel Carson s lyrical popular books about the sea including her best selling The Sea Around Us set a standard for nature writing By the late 1950s Carson was the most respected science writer in America She completed Silent Spring 1962 against formidable personal odds and with it shaped a powerful social movement that has altered the course of history In Silent Spring Carson asserted that the right of the citizen to be secure in his own home against the intrusion of poisons applied by other persons must surely be a basic human right She was the first to challenge the moral vacuity of a government that refused to take responsibility for or to acknowledge evidence of environmental damage In this volume today s foremost scientists and writers give compelling evidence that Carson s transformative insights her courage for the earth are giving a new generation of activists the inspiration they need to move consumers industry and government to action Contributors include John Elder Al Gore John Hay Freeman House Linda Lear Robert Michael Pyle Janisse Ray Sandra Steingraber Terry Tempest Williams and E O Wilson Rachel Carson s lyrical popular books about the sea includingher best selling The Sea Around Us set a standard for naturewriting for all time to come Roger Caras By the late 1950s Carson was the most respected science writer in America She completed Silent Spring 1962 against formidable personalodds and with it shaped a powerful social movement thathas altered the course of history In Silent Spring Carson asserted that the right of the citizen to be secure in his own home against the intrusion of poisons applied by other persons must surely be a basic human right She was the first to challenge the moral vacuity of a government that refused to take responsibility for or to

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About the Author

PETER MATTHIESSEN's many books include The Snow Leopard and At Play in the Fields of the Lord. He lives in Sagaponack, New York.

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Introduction She was always a writer and she always knew that. Like Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and other American contemporaries with the same affliction, ten-year-old Rachel Louise Carson, born in 1907 in the Allegheny Valley in Springdale, Pennsylvania, was first published in the St. Nicholas literary magazine for children. A loner and a reader and a devotee of birds and indeed all nature, the slim, shy girl of plain face and dark curly hair continued writing throughout adolescence: she chose an English major at Pennsylvania College for Women and continued to submit poetry to periodicals. Not until her junior year, when a biology course reawakened the “sense of wonder” with which she had always encountered the natural world, did she switch her major to zoology, still unaware that these passions might be complementary.
Graduating magna cum laude in 1929, Carson went on to Johns Hopkins to complete her master’s degree in zoology, but increasing family responsibilities caused her to abandon her quest for a doctorate. For a few years she would teach zoology at the University of Maryland, continuing her studies in the summer at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. It was there, in her early twenties, that she first fell under the spell of the eternal mysteries of the sea.
In 1932, “Ray” Carson, as some friends knew her, took part-time work as a writer-editor for the old Bureau of Fisheries, a job that led, in 1936, to a full-time appointment as a junior aquatic biologist. To eke out her small salary, she contributed feature articles to the Baltimore Sun, most of them related to marine fisheries and the sea. Though her poetry was never to be published, a strong lyrical prose was already evolving, and one of her pieces for a government publication seemed to the editor so elegant and unusual that he urged her to submit it to the Atlantic Monthly.

Thus . . . the parts of the plan fall into place: the water receiving from earth and air the simple materials, storing them until the gathering energy of the spring sun wakens the sleeping plants to a burst of dynamic activity, hungry swarms of planktonic animals growing and multiplying upon the abundant plants, and themselves falling prey to the shoals of fish; all, in the end, to be redissolved into their component substances . . . Individual elements are lost to view, only to reappear again and again in different incarnations in a kind of material immortality.

“Undersea,” the young writer’s first publication in a national magazine (September 1937), was seminal in theme and tone to all her later writing. Together with an evocative Sun feature, “Chesapeake Eels Seek the Sargasso Sea” (“From every river and stream along the whole Atlantic Coast, eels are hurrying to the sea . . .”), it was the starting point for her first book, Under the Sea-Wind. Though its feeling was near-mystical — the ever- changing changelessness of life on earth — the book’s method took after Salar the Salmon and Taka the Otter, two popular tales by the British writer Henry Williamson. (Carson’s other revered Henrys were Thoreau, Beston (The Outermost House), and Tomlinson, the literary editor of the Nation and Athenaeum, whose vacation chronicle, The Sea and the Jungle, described a voyage from England to South America, then up the Amazon; The Sea and the Jungle may well be the finest writing on the sea, Conrad included.) Like Williamson, Carson used anthropomorphic characters to carry the narrative, notably Scomber the Mackerel (from Scomber scombrus, the Atlantic mackerel’s taxonomic name).
He came into being as a tiny globule no larger than a poppy seed, drifting in the surface layers of pale-green water. The globule carried an amber droplet of oil that served to keep it afloat and it carried also a gray particle of living matter so small that it could have been picked up on the point of a needle. In time this particle was to become Scomber, the mackerel, a powerful fish, streamlined after the manner of his kind, and a rover of the seas.

However, the real protagonist of this work (as of its better known successors) was the sea itself — “whether I wished it or not,” as Carson explained in her original foreword, “for the sense of the sea, holding the power of life and death over every one of its creatures from the smallest to the largest, would inevitably pervade every page.”

To stand at the edge of the sea, to sense the ebb and flow of the tides, to feel the breath of a mist moving over a great salt marsh, to watch the flight of shorebirds that have swept up and down the surf lines of the continents for untold thousands of years, to see the running of the old eels and tthe young shad to the sea, is to have knowledge of things that are as nearly eternal as any earthly life can be. These things were before mannnnn ever stood on the shore of the ocean and looked out upon it with wonder; they continue year in, year out, throughout the centuries and ages, while man’s kingdoms rise and fall.

Under the Sea-Wind was to remain Carson’s favorite among her books. Published in 1941, on the eve of World War II, it sold less than two thousand copies and passed almost unnoticed. Meanwhile, the Bureau of Fisheries had joined in 1940 with the old Biological Survey to become the Fish and Wildlife Service, and her editorial duties had increased, together with her biological assignments; she was specializing now in marine zoology and was later promoted to chief editor of publications.
Although gentle with contributors, Carson the editor (according to her colleagues) could be “tart and wry” about lackluster writing. Toward her own work, she was ever more rigorous and demanding, not only in regard to the depth and breadth of her research but in the economy and clarity of her style, which she revised, read aloud, and tightened with the glad exhilaration of the born writer.
Colleagues enjoyed working with her because of her uncommon competence and dedication but also because of her childlike enthusiasm and undiminished wonder at the myriad ways of nature, which made a scientific expedition out of the simplest foray into field or tide pool. In their first meeting, the naturalist Louis Halle (Springtime in Washington) found Carson “quiet, diffident, neat, proper, and without affectation — serious, dignified, with a gentle voice.” Nothing written about her since seems to dispute this. But for all her modesty and restraint, she had confidence in her own literary worth and was neither prim nor meek; she had a mischievous streak and an edge to her tongue, and once she was published, became an astute businesswoman and career tactician.
A decade after Carson’s first book, her agent, Marie Rodell, circulated a second work in progress that proposed to explore the origins and geological aspects of the sea. Already the author was corresponding with marine scientists everywhere and had even embarked on a Woods Hole research vessel for a sea voyage — her first and last — to the Georges Banks. Because her first book was unsuccessful and its author little known, the new one was widely rejected, despite strong endorsements and support from such influential eminences as the great Woods Hole oceanographer Dr. Henry Bigelow, Dr. Robert C. Murphy of the American Museum of Natural History, Dr. William Beebe of the New York Zoological Society, Thor Heyerdahl of Kon-tiki, and the best-selling naturalist-writer Edwin Way Teale. The material was refused by fifteen magazines, including National Geographic. In September 1950, however, a section titled “The Birth of an Island” appeared in the Yale Review; another section was subsequently accepted by Science Digest. Eventually the material came into the hands of Edith Oliver at The New Yorker, who recommended it to William Shawn, who recognized its exceptional quality at once. Much of it was serialized as “A Profile of the Sea,” and in July of the following year, the whole manuscript was published as The Sea Around Us. It won the John Burroughs Medal, then the National Book Award, and within the year sold more than 200,000 copies in hardcover. (Under the Sea-Wind, resurrected, was to join it for a prolonged stay on the bestseller list.) What came across in all of Carson’s work was what Alfred Schweitzer called “a reverence for life.” Accused of “ignoring God” in The Sea Around Us, she responded, “As far as I am concerned, there is absolutely no conflict between a belief in evolution and a belief in God as the creator. Believing as I do in evolution, I merely believe that is the method by which God created, and is still creating, life on earth. And it is a method so marvelously conceived that to study it in detail is to increase — and certainly never to diminish — one’s reverence and awe both for the Creator and the process.” Although the sea was her obsession, Carson wrote beautifully on other subjects, from the threat of nuclear technology and the first signs of global warming to animal rights and the importance of introducing nature to young children. She was always interested in the writing process, understanding that “the writer must never try to impose himself upon his subject. He must not try to mold it according to what he believes his readers or editors want to read. His initial task is to come to know his subject intimately, to understand its every aspect, to let it fill his mind. Then at some turning point the subject takes command and the true act of creation begins.” In combining her writing with a career in science, she had what she once called “the magic combination of factual knowledge and deeply felt emotional response.” In accepting the National Book Award in 1952, with cowinners James Jones and Marianne Moore, she said, “There is no such thing as a separate literature of science, since the aim of science is to discover and illuminate the truth, which is also the aim of all true literature.” As Paul Brooks, her friend and editor at Houghton Mifflin, comments in Rachel Carson: The Writer at Work, “As a writer she used words to reveal the poetry — which is to say the essential truth and meaning — at the core of any scientific fact. She sought the knowledge that is essential to appreciate the extent of the unknown.”

Success permitted Carson to retire from the FWS in 1952 and write full-time. The following summer she bought land and built a cottage on the Sheepscot River near West Southport on the coast of Maine, where she and her mother had visited since 1946. Maria Carson, a kindred spirit in her nature study, had been subtly possessive of her gentle daughter, whom she encouraged to support several family members in addition to herself. Her mother, who died in 1958, is generally accounted responsible for the fact that Carson never married and had children, although she would adopt her sister’s orphaned son. In an article of this period called “Help Your Child to Wonder,” Carson expressed her intense belief in the importance of nature study for the young.

A child’s world is fresh and new and beautiful, full of wonder and excitement. It is our misfortune that for most of us that clear-eyed vision, that true instinct for what is beautiful and awe-inspiring, is dimmed and even lost before we reach adulthood . . . The years of early childhood are the time to prepare the soil. Once the emotions have been aroused — a sense of the beautiful, the excitement of the new and the unknown, a feeling of sympathy, pity, admiration or love — then we wish for knowledge . . . Once found, it has lasting meaning. It is more important to pave the way for the child to want to know than to put him on a diet of facts he is not ready to assimilate.

During her Maine summers Carson was active in local conservation efforts and engaged, as she did everywhere, in the close examination of nature, from rocks to insects to marine flora. Nothing was lost on her.

[The firefly] was flying so low over the water that his light cast a long surface reflection, like a little headlight. Then the truth dawned on me. He “thought” the flashes in the water [the phosphorescence of sparkling diatoms thrown up by small breaking waves] were other fireflies, signalling to him in the age-old manner of fireflies. Sure enough, he was soon in trouble and we saw his light flashing urgently as he was rolled around in the wet sand. (From a letter to Dorothy and Stanley Freeman, 1956)

By now, The New Yorker had serialized The Edge of the Sea, the third volume of her marine trilogy, which evoked the ecology of maritime communities on three types of coast — the rock-bound shores north of Cape Cod, ruled by the tides; the sand beaches to the south of it, ruled by the waves; and the coral reefs of southern Florida, whose ecology is mainly determined by the ocean currents. This book, which was also a bestseller, was followed in March of the following year by a Carson-scripted television film on clouds called Something About the Sky.

Carson’s new celebrity had given her the confidence and opportunity to speak out strongly for the environmental cause. In an op-ed letter to the Washington Post condemning the ouster by the new Republican administration of a competent and principled secretary of the interior, Albert M. Day, in favor of the crass, partisan political appointee Benton McKay, she found the cool and furious tone that would serve her well in Silent Spring a few years later.

For many years public-spirited citizens throughout the country have been working for the conservation of natural resources, realizing their vital importance to the Nation. Apparently their hard-won progress is to be wiped out, as a politically-minded Administration returns us to the dark ages of unrestrained exploitation and destruction. It is one of the ironies of our time that, while concentrating on the defense of our country against enemies from without, we should be so heedless of those who would destroy it from within.

She could have signed that identical letter today.
As early as 1945, Carson and her close colleague Dr. Clarence Cottam had become alarmed by government abuse of new chemical insecticides such as DDT. Most of these highly toxic materials had been derived from lethal compounds developed originally for use in war; the “predator” and “pest” control programs, in particular, which were broadcasting poisons with little regard for the welfare of other creatures. That same year, she offered an article to Reader’s Digest on insecticide experiments going on in nearby Patuxent, Maryland, not far from her home in Silver Spring, to determine the effects of DDT on valuable insects as well as on birds and other life. The Digest was not interested, though Harper’s and the Atlantic Monthly had published articles by others that same year that warned of the dangers of DDT to the balance of nature. Carson went back to her government job and her sea trilogy, and not until after the third volume had been completed did she return to this earlier preoccupation.
By that time, the insecticide barrage had been augmented by dieldrin, parathion, heptachlor, malathion, and other fearful compounds many times stronger than DDT, all of which the government planned to distribute through the Department of Agriculture for public use and commercial manufacture. “The more I learned about the use of pesticides, the more appalled I became,” Carson recalled. “I realized that here was the material for a book. What I discovered was that everything which meant most to me as a naturalist was being threatened, and that nothing I could do would be more important.” She intended to make certain that if the public continued to let itself be led by politicians who stood by and permitted the looting of world resources and the pollution of the land, air, and water that our children must inherit, it would not be b...

Edition details

• Publisher: Harper Paperbacks
• Publication date: 2007
• ISBN 10: 0618872760
• ISBN 13: 9780618872763
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 208