Rachel Louise Carson (May 27, 1907 – April 14, 1964) was an American marine biologist, author, and conservationist whose book Silent Spring and other writings are credited with advancing the global environmental movement.

Carson began her career as an aquatic biologist in the U.S. Bureau of Fisheries, and became a full-time nature writer in the 1950s.

Late in the 1950s, Carson turned her attention to conservation, especially some problems that she believed were caused by synthetic pesticides.

The result was the book Silent Spring (1962), which brought environmental concerns to an unprecedented share of the American people.

Rachel Carson was born on May 27, 1907, on a family farm near Springdale, Pennsylvania, just up the Allegheny River from Pittsburgh.

Carson attended Springdale's small school through tenth grade, then completed high school in nearby Parnassus, Pennsylvania, graduating in 1925 at the top of her class of forty-four students.

She originally studied English, but switched her major to biology in January 1928, though she continued contributing to the school's student newspaper and literary supplement.

Though admitted to graduate standing at Johns Hopkins University in 1928, she was forced to remain at the Pennsylvania College for Women for her senior year due to financial difficulties; she graduated magna cum laude in 1929.

After a summer course at the Marine Biological Laboratory, she continued her studies in zoology and genetics at Johns Hopkins in the fall of 1929.After her first year of graduate school, Carson became a part-time student, taking an assistantship in Raymond Pearl's laboratory, where she worked with rats and Drosophila, to earn money for tuition.

She earned a master's degree in zoology in June 1932.

She had intended to continue for a doctorate, but in 1934 Carson was forced to leave Johns Hopkins to search for a full-time teaching position to help support her family during the Great Depression.

In 1935, her father died suddenly, worsening their already critical financial situation and leaving Carson to care for her aging mother.

Sitting for the civil service exam, she outscored all other applicants and, in 1936, became the second woman hired by the Bureau of Fisheries for a full-time professional position, as a junior aquatic biologist.

However, her family responsibilities further increased in January 1937 when her older sister died, leaving Carson as the sole breadwinner for her mother and two nieces.

In July 1937, the Atlantic Monthly accepted a revised version of an essay, The World of Waters, that she originally wrote for her first fisheries bureau brochure.

Several years of writing resulted in Under the Sea Wind (1941), which received excellent reviews but sold poorly.

Carson attempted to leave the Bureau (by then transformed into the United States Fish and Wildlife Service) in 1945, but few jobs for naturalists were available, as most money for science was focused on technical fields in the wake of the Manhattan Project.

In mid-1945, Carson first encountered the subject of DDT, a revolutionary new pesticide—lauded as the "insect bomb" after the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki—that was only beginning to undergo tests for safety and ecological effects.

Carson rose within the Fish and Wildlife Service, by 1945 supervising a small writing staff and in 1949 becoming chief editor of publications.

By 1948, Carson was working on material for a second book and had made the conscious decision to begin a transition to writing full-time.

Oxford University Press expressed interest in Carson's book proposal for a life history of the ocean, spurring her to complete by early 1950 the manuscript of what would become The Sea Around Us.

Nine chapters were serialized in The New Yorker beginning June 1951 and the book was published July 2, 1951, by Oxford University Press.

The Sea Around Us remained on The New York Times Best Seller list for 86 weeks, was abridged by Reader's Digest, won the 1952 National Book Award for Nonfiction and the John Burroughs Medal, and resulted in Carson's being awarded two honorary doctorates.

With success came financial security, and in 1952 Carson was able to give up her job in order to concentrate on writing full-time.

It went on to win the 1953 Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature, but Carson was so embittered by the experience that she never again sold film rights to her work.

Carson first met Dorothy Freeman in the summer of 1953 in Southport Island, Maine.

Many of these were published in the book Always, Rachel, published in 1995 by Beacon Press.

The surviving correspondence were published in 1995 as Always, Rachel:

In the Spring of 1964, Dorothy received half of Rachel's ashes in the mail sent to her by Robert Carson.

Early in 1953, Carson began library and field research on the ecology and organisms of the Atlantic shore.

In 1955, she completed the third volume of her sea trilogy, The Edge of the Sea, which focuses on life in coastal ecosystems, particularly along the Eastern Seaboard.

Through 1955 and 1956, Carson worked on a number of projects—including the script for an Omnibus episode, "Something About the Sky"—and wrote articles for popular magazines.

Silent Spring, Carson's best-known book, was published by Houghton Mifflin on 27 September 1962.

In 1994, an edition of Silent Spring was published with an introduction written by Vice President Al Gore.

In 2012 Silent Spring was designated a National Historic Chemical Landmark by the American Chemical Society for its role in the development of the modern environmental movement.

Starting in the mid-1940s, Carson had become concerned about the use of synthetic pesticides, many of which had been developed through the military funding of science since World War II.

It was the United States federal government's 1957 gypsy moth eradication program, however, that prompted Carson to devote her research, and her next book, to pesticides and environmental poisons.

By 1958, Carson had arranged a book deal, with plans to co-write with Newsweek science journalist Edwin Diamond.

She also found significant support and extensive evidence from a group of biodynamic agriculture organic market gardeners, their adviser, Dr. Ehrenfried Pfeiffer, other contacts, and their suite of legal actions (1957-1960) against the U.S. Government.

According to recent research by Paull (2013), this may have been the primary and (for strategic reasons) uncredited source for Carson's book.

By 1959, the USDA's Agricultural Research Service responded to the criticism by Carson and others with a public service film, Fire Ant on Trial; Carson characterized it as "flagrant propaganda" that ignored the dangers that spraying pesticides (especially dieldrin and heptachlor) posed to humans and wildlife.

That was also the year of the "Great Cranberry Scandal": the 1957, 1958, and 1959 crops of U.S. cranberries were found to contain high levels of the herbicide aminotriazole (which caused cancer in laboratory rats) and the sale of all cranberry products was halted.

By 1960, Carson had more than enough research material, and the writing was progressing rapidly.

Most of the research and writing was done by the fall of 1960, except for the discussion of recent research on biological pest controls and investigations of a handful of new pesticides.

However, further health troubles slowed the final revisions in 1961 and early 1962.

By August 1961, Carson finally agreed to the suggestion of her literary agent Marie Rodell: Silent Spring would be a metaphorical title for the entire book, suggesting a bleak future for the whole natural world, rather than a literal chapter title about the absence of birdsong.

By mid-1962, Brooks and Carson had largely finished the editing, and were laying the groundwork for promoting the book by sending the manuscript out to select individuals for final suggestions.

Carson attended the White House Conference on Conservation in May 1962; Houghton Mifflin distributed proof copies of Silent Spring to many of the delegates, and promoted the upcoming New Yorker serialization.

Among many others, Carson also sent a proof copy to Supreme Court Associate Justice William O. Douglas, a longtime environmental advocate who had argued against the court's rejection of the Long Island pesticide spraying case (and who had provided Carson with some of the material included in her chapter on herbicides).Though Silent Spring had generated a fairly high level of interest based on prepublication promotion, this became much more intense with the serialization in The New Yorker, which began in the June 16, 1962, issue.

Pesticide use became a major public issue, especially after the CBS Reports TV special The Silent Spring of Rachel Carson that aired April 3, 1963.

The committee issued its report on May 15, 1963, largely backing Carson's scientific claims.

In late 1963, she received a flurry of awards and honors: the Audubon Medal (from the National Audubon Society), the Cullum Geographical Medal (from the American Geographical Society), and induction into the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Death Weakened from breast cancer and her treatment regimen, Carson became ill with a respiratory virus in January 1964.

She died of a heart attack on April 14, 1964, in her home in Silver Spring, Maryland.

In 1965, Rodell arranged for the publication of an essay Carson had intended to expand into a book: The Sense of Wonder.

Carson's work, and the activism it inspired, are at least partly responsible for the deep ecology movement, and the overall strength of the grassroots environmental movement since the 1960s.

Though environmental concerns about DDT had been considered by government agencies as early as Carson's testimony before the President's Science Advisory Committee, the 1967 formation of the Environmental Defense Fund was the first major milestone in the campaign against DDT.

By 1972, the Environmental Defense Fund and other activist groups had succeeded in securing a phase-out of DDT use in the United States (except in emergency cases).The creation of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) by the Nixon Administration in 1970 addressed another concern that Carson had brought to light.

In the 1980s, the policies of the Reagan Administration emphasized economic growth, rolling back many of the environmental policies adopted in response to Carson and her work.

Perhaps most significantly, on June 9, 1980, Carson was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian honor in the United States.

In 1973, Carson was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame.

The University of California, Santa Cruz, named one of its colleges (formerly known as College Eight) to Rachel Carson College in 2016.

Munich's Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society was founded in 2009.

Carson's birthplace and childhood home in Springdale, Pennsylvania, now known as the Rachel Carson Homestead, became a National Register of Historic Places site and the nonprofit Rachel Carson Homestead Association was created in 1975 to manage it.

Her home in Colesville, Maryland where she wrote Silent Spring was named a National Historic Landmark in 1991.

Near Pittsburgh, a 35.7 miles (57 km) hiking trail, called the Rachel Carson Trail and maintained by the Rachel Carson Trails Conservancy, was dedicated to Carson in 1975.

Between 1964 and 1990, 650 acres (263 ha) near Brookeville in Montgomery County, Maryland were acquired and set aside as the Rachel Carson Conservation Park, administered by the Maryland-National Capital Park and Planning Commission.

In 1969, the Coastal Maine National Wildlife Refuge became the Rachel Carson National Wildlife Refuge; expansions will bring the size of the refuge to about 9,125 acres (3,693 ha).

In 1985, North Carolina renamed one of its estuarine reserves in honor of Carson, in Beaufort.

The Rachel Carson Prize, founded in Stavanger, Norway in 1991, is awarded to women who have made a contribution in the field of environmental protection.

The American Society for Environmental History has awarded the Rachel Carson Prize for Best Dissertation since 1993.

Since 1998, the Society for Social Studies of Science has awarded an annual Rachel Carson Book Prize for "a book length work of social or political relevance in the area of science and technology studies.

The Society of Environmental Journalists gives an annual award and two honourable mentions for books on environmental issues in Carson's name, such as was awarded to Joe Roman's Listed: Dispatches from America's Endangered Species Act in 2012.The Rachel Carson sculpture in Woods Hole, Massachusetts was unveiled on July 14, 2013.

Google created a Google Doodle for Carson's 107th birthday on May 27, 2014.

Carson was featured during the "HerStory" video tribute to notable women on U2's tour in 2017 for the 30th anniversary of The Joshua Tree during a performance of "Ultraviolet (Light My Way)" from the band's 1991 album Achtung Baby.

The centennial of Carson's birth occurred in 2007.

Also in 2007 American author Ginger Wadsworth wrote a biography of Carson.

Further reading Brooks, Paul (1972).

Lepore, Jill , "The Shore Bird: Rachel Carson and the rising of the seas", The New Yorker, 26 March 2018, pp.

Koehn, Nancy, "From Calm Leadership, Lasting Change", The New York Times, October 27, 2012.

Why Our Winters Are Getting Warmer", November 1951, Popular Science—early article by Rachel Carson about how the ocean's currents affect climate (excerpt from her 1951 book, The Sea Around Us).