Rachel Carson was born in Springdale, Pennsylvania, the USA on May 27, 1907. Carson was the first to warn the world about the environmental impact of fertilizers and pesticides and was considered the founder of the modern environmental movement.

 

Rachel Carson is the youngest of three brothers from Robert and Maria McLean Carson. She grew up in Pennsylvania farm, where she learned a lot about nature and wildlife directly. Her passion for nature descended from her mother, and in the end, she could become a writer for children’s magazines at a very early age at the age of 10 years.

 

She attended school at Pennsylvania College for Women, now renamed Chatham University and graduated magna cum laude in 1929. She studied at an oceanography institute in Woods Hole, Massachusetts and at Johns Hopkins University, Maryland where she received a master’s degree in zoology in 1932.

 

Due to financial problems in the family forced her to no longer pursue a doctorate and help support her mother and also her two orphaned nieces. Rachel Carson taught at the University of Maryland for five years before she finally joined the United States Fish and Wildlife Service in 1936.

 

After deciding to work in government, she succeeded in defeating all other applicants on civil service examinations and in 1936 Carson became the second woman hired by the United States Fisheries Bureau. Carson worked there for 15 years, writing brochures and other materials for the public. She was promoted to Chief Editor of all publications for the US Fish and Wildlife Service for her excellent work.

 

After working for the US Fish and Fish Service, Carson publishes The Sea Around Us and other books. Her most famous book is the Silent Spring which was completed in 1962 and is quite controversial, in which she describes the destructive effects of pesticides such as DDT on the environment.

 

Carson won the national science prize,  the National Book Award and Guggenheim grant because the good sale of her book and enabled her to move to Southport Island, Maine in 1953 to concentrate as a writer.

 

In 1955, she published The Edge of the Sea and became a favorite book and her sales were excellent as well. She also started working with Dorothy Freeman. Although much of their correspondence was destroyed shortly before Carson’s death, the rest was published by Freeman’s grandson in 1995, “Rachel: The Letters of Rachel Carson and Dorothy Freeman, 1952-1964: An Extraordinary Friendship and Friendship”.

 

The first book, Under the Sea-Wind published in 1941, describes marine life in a clear, elegant and non-technical prose. She defended work in government until the 1940s, partly to help support her mother and two orphaned sisters.

 

In 1951 she published The Sea Around Us, which instantly became a best-seller and the sale of the book generated a high income and ultimately relieved her from financial worries.

 

Throughout the 1950s, she conducted some research on what is the effects of pesticides on the food chain. On that year she also published her most influential work, Silent Spring in 1962 which condemned the indiscriminate use of pesticides, especially DDT and eventually banned after that.

 

This book leads to a presidential commission that largely supports its findings, and helps shape environmental awareness. The environmental activist died due to cancer on April 14, 1964. Her steps and struggle was a success because, in 1980, Rachel was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Her houses also considered a national historic place, and numerous other awards are widely accepted. Rachel Carson will always be remembered as an environmentalist who works to preserve the world against dangerous things, especially pesticides.

 

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