WORLD OF SCIENCE
Hard battles won
DR. T. V. PADMA
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Carson's radical ideas caused a furore.
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After World War II, Rachel Carson wrote her second book about the sea. To write this book, Rachel actually went diving in the Florida Keys, on the advice of the famous oceanographer Beebe.
The book, The Sea Around Us, was a bestseller. It received the National Book Award for the best non-fiction book of 1951. Rachel was showered with honorary degrees, and became the second woman elected to join the National Institute of Arts and Letters. Rachel's next books, The Edge of the Sea, and The Sense of Wonder, also became bestsellers; but she is best remembered for Silent Spring — a book that created what the Times called "a noisy summer".
Silent Spring was controversial, because it criticised the human attitude to nature. Moreover, it was the first published work to document a link between chemicals and environmental destruction. Rachel wrote the book after years of research — she did not conduct experiments herself, but collated the work of her colleagues, and came up with the idea that pesticides could bioconcentrate and bioaccumulate along the food chain.
Medal winner
Her radical idea created a furore. Corporations manufacturing pesticides tried to discredit her work as the work of a hysterical woman, rather than as that of an intelligent scientist.
Rachel tackled the angry reactions with equanimity. She refused to back down. She went on television and spoke out to defend the quality of her work. She began what would later be called the environmental movement. In 1963, the President's Special Advisory Committee confirmed her arguments against the widespread use of pesticides. Rachel became the first woman to receive the Audubon Medal.
Her battles had taken a toll and she was suffering from cancer. She died at the age of 54, but her books continue to keep alive her memory.
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