Rachel
Carson
As an adult, this legendary biologist and nature writer warned about the dangers of pollution and its impact on the environment in her book Silent Spring. But Rachel Carson first developed her “sense of wonder” about the natural world as a girl exploring the woods around her family’s farm in western Pennsylvania.
“I can remember no time when I didn’t assume I was going to be a writer,” Rachel Carson once said. “Also, I can remember no time when I wasn’t interested in the out-of-doors and the whole world of nature.”
Rachel Louise Carson was born on May 27, 1907, in Springdale, Pennsylvania, a small town on the Allegheny River. Her mother, Maria, was a piano teacher. Her father, Robert, was an insurance salesman.
The youngest of three children, Rachel grew up in a farmhouse surrounded by many acres of woods and apple orchards. As soon as Rachel learned to walk, her parents encouraged her to play outside.
Mrs. Carson especially took a keen interest in natural history. She considered the woodlands a vast laboratory where her children could learn all about plant and animal life.
Every morning, Rachel’s mother woke her up early so she could listen to the birds singing outside her window. On the walk to school, Rachel would talk to the birds as if they were her neighbors.
Sometimes her mother would accompany her on walks through the woods and teach her the names of all the flowers, birds, and insects they encountered. Mrs. Carson even kept a diary to document their shared love of the outdoors.
On one of their walks together, Rachel noticed that the sky above the treeline was a sickly gray color. Her mother explained that this was because of ash being belched out of the steel mills downriver. Rachel began to understand that, along with her appreciation for the natural world came a responsibility to protect it—especially from pollution.
The more Rachel explored the world outside her window, the more curious she became. One day while she was rooting around in the yard, she discovered a fossilized seashell buried in the dirt. Rachel’s mind teemed with questions: How old was it? How did it end up in a rural Pennsylvania field when the ocean was so far away? She was beginning to think like a scientist.
Natural processes fascinated Rachel. She started collecting caterpillars and cocoons so she could watch them metamorphose into moths and butterflies.
Whenever Rachel came home with a new critter from one of her expeditions, her mother told her to return it where she had found it. Mrs. Carson strongly believed that creatures should be allowed to live freely in their natural habitats. Rachel was not even permitted to kill insects inside the house. Instead, she was instructed to catch them and let them go outside.
As much as she loved the world of nature, Rachel had one other great passion: reading. She liked stories about animals the best. Some of her favorite authors were Beatrix Potter, the creator of Peter Rabbit, and Gene Stratton-Porter, a pioneering female nature photographer who wrote a series of books on wildlife and birdwatching.
As she grew older, the seafaring novels of Herman Melville, Joseph Conrad, and Robert Louis Stevenson also captured Rachel’s imagination.
Inspired by these writers, Rachel started dreaming up her own nature stories. Her first attempt was a ten-page book of animal drawings in crayon and colored pencil, each accompanied by a few lines of verse.
On the title page, she drew a picture of an elephant and inscribed it to her father:
This little book I’ve made for you my dear
I’ll hope you’ll like the pictures well
The animals that you’ll find in here
About them all—I’ll tell.
Many of the creatures pictured in the book were ones that Rachel had encountered on her walks through the woods. They included a mouse, a frog, a rabbit, and an owl. Other animals, such as a dog, a hen, a canary, and a fish, lived on the Carson family’s farm.
When Rachel was ten years old, she decided to see if she could get one of her stories published. Every month the children’s magazine St. Nicholas held a writing contest for kids. Winners were awarded gold badges, with silver badges given to the runners-up.
Rachel submitted her first story to the contest in May of 1918. “A Battle in the Clouds” recounted the exploits of a World War I flying ace in the skies over France. Her mother certified that “this story was written without assistance, by my little ten-year-old daughter, Rachel.” The next day, Mr. Carson mailed the story off on his way to work.
A few months later, Rachel received a copy of St. Nicholas magazine with her story published in it, along with a silver badge for excellence. For the next year, she wrote and submitted action-packed war stories to the contest. Four of her tales were published, making her one of their star contributors.
When Rachel was fourteen years old, she made her first professional sale. The moment a $3 check arrived, Rachel wrote the words “first payment” on the envelope and tucked it away for safekeeping.
The next year, Rachel decided to switch subjects. Instead of writing about dogfights in the air or heroes of the Spanish-American War, she crafted a true account of her experiences searching for birds’ nests in the woods near her house. In the story, “My Favorite Recreation,” Rachel chronicled a day spent hiking on the trail with her dog Pal and “a lunchbox, a canteen, a notebook, and a camera” by her side. She listed all the birds that she and Pal discovered, from a hummingbird to a cuckoo.
St. Nicholas published “My Favorite Recreation” in its July 1922 issue. Rachel had become a professional nature writer at the age of fifteen.
That fall, Rachel put aside her pen—temporarily—to focus on the start of high school. She quickly won over her teachers with her good humor and excellent study habits. Four years later, she graduated at the top of her class. Inside her yearbook, her classmates printed a poem that praised her hard work and perfectionism. It read:
Rachel’s like the mid-day sun
Always very bright
Never stops her studying
’til she gets it right.
For Rachel, “getting it right” meant teaching others about the importance of protecting the environment—something she continued to do for the rest of her life.
In her senior thesis, Rachel urged her classmates not to “recklessly squander our natural resources.” Later, while working as a junior aquatic biologist at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in the 1940s, she wrote a steady stream of newspaper and magazine articles about ocean life and other subjects. Eventually, she became so well known for her nature writing that she was able to devote herself to it full-time.
The publication in 1962 of her most famous book, Silent Spring, made Rachel Carson a household name. Even more important, the book helped inspire a worldwide environmental movement. But it was an article that Rachel wrote in 1956 that best captured the feelings of awe and amazement she first experienced as a kid scientist.
“A child’s world is fresh and new and beautiful, full of wonder and excitement,” Rachel wrote in her essay “Help Your Child to Wonder.” In her writings, she stressed the importance of learning to appreciate the sights and sounds of the world around us, such as “the dawn chorus of the birds in spring.” Just as her mother had taught her all those years ago.
Rachel also urged kids everywhere to pay attention to what the planet is trying to tell us. “Take time to listen and talk about the voices of the earth and what they mean—the majestic voice of thunder, the winds, the sound of surf.”
