On a Farther Shore: The Life and Legacy of Rachel Carson, Author of Silent Spring
William Souder
Language: English
Pages: 520
ISBN: 0307462218
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
A New York Times Notable Book of 2012
Rachel Carson loved the ocean and wrote three books about its mysteries. But it was with her fourth book, Silent Spring, that this unassuming biologist transformed our relationship with the natural world. Silent Spring was a chilling indictment of DDT and other pesticides that until then had been hailed as safe and wondrously effective. It was Carson who sifted through all the evidence, documenting with alarming clarity the collateral damage to fish, birds, and other wildlife; revealing the effects of these new chemicals to be lasting, widespread, and lethal. Silent Spring shocked the public and forced the government to take action, despite a withering attack on Carson from the chemicals industry. It awakened the world to the heedless contamination of the environment and eventually led to the establishment of the EPA and to the banning of DDT. By drawing frightening parallels between dangerous chemicals and the then-pervasive fallout from nuclear testing, Carson opened a fault line between the gentle ideal of conservation and the more urgent new concept of environmentalism.
Elegantly written and meticulously researched, On a Farther Shore reveals a shy yet passionate woman more at home in the natural world than in the literary one that embraced her. William Souder also writes sensitively of Carson's romantic friendship with Dorothy Freeman, and of Carson's death from cancer in 1964. This extraordinary new biography captures the essence of one of the great reformers of the twentieth century.
hard, especially when they are emotionally as well as intellectually dear to one. It was pleasant to believe, for example, that much of Nature was forever beyond the tampering reach of man. Carson said that when humans cleared a forest or dammed a river the world went on. She had always believed that the environment molded life, not the other way around. And yet so it had come to be. This was disorienting. Carson confessed that she had “shut her mind” to what was happening for a long time, but
Carson’s swelling files was an herbicide expert named Frank Egler. An unusual sort—Carson seemed to attract them—Egler wrote long, intermittently neurotic letters about the ecological hazards of herbicide use, mainly in the control of roadside brush. Egler had been dismissed from the American Museum of Natural History in 1955 for making controversial public statements about roadside spraying and had retreated to manage a private forest reserve in Connecticut, where he got by on family money and
remembrances assembled from Leopold’s journals. Oxford, hoping for something they could use in publicizing the book, sent it to their most famous author—Carson—for comment. This backfired when Carson discovered the book included hunting and trapping escapades in which an assortment of animals were killed or tormented. Carson told Oxford they could quote her but that they wouldn’t want to, as Round River was in her opinion “a truly shocking book” that had left her in a state of “cold anger.”
Shortly before the book’s official publication on November 1, 1941, Carson sent a copy of Under the Sea-Wind to her editor at the Baltimore Sun, who wrote her a note saying how much he liked it except for the opening chapters that composed Book I, “Edge of the Sea.” Carson would later admit that many readers felt the same way, though for her these five chapters about life along the threshold of the ocean—based so much on her own observations at Beaufort and at Woods Hole—had an inner meaning
Cortez was published on December 5, 1941, two days before the attack at Pearl Harbor, and it suffered the same fate as Carson’s Under the Sea-Wind, collecting a handful of nice reviews before being swallowed up and lost in the turbulence of war. Carson presumably read Sea of Cortez—she read everything about the ocean and sea life—and she might have felt an affinity for the narrative portion of the book, as it was more like her own writing than was the unadorned, factual text of Ricketts’s Between