Do we like Rachel Carson?
Our score: 9 out of 10. She spent her career defending wildlife and public health, took a hammering for it, and nothing harmful turned up in her own words or acts.
Rachel Carson grew up on a farm near Springdale, Pennsylvania, born in 1907. She started university studying English, switched to biology, and went on to study and teach at Johns Hopkins and the University of Maryland. She left her PhD program because she couldn't earn enough to support her family.
In 1935 she joined the U.S. Bureau of Fisheries, wrote radio programs and brochures, and ended up editor-in-chief of its publications. Her sea books followed, and The Sea Around Us spent 86 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. So by the time she turned on the chemical industry she was already a proven writer with a big audience.
Silent Spring ran in The New Yorker in June 1962 and then as a book. It warned about the indiscriminate use of pesticides including DDT, and chemical companies tried to discredit her. A DDT maker, Velsicol, reportedly threatened her publisher with legal action, and a former Agriculture Secretary privately wrote that she was probably a communist, per the Environment and Society Portal's account of the attacks.
A lot of the pushback was plain sexism. Edwin Diamond's 1963 Saturday Evening Post piece called her arguments “more emotional than accurate”, and the Post's retelling says it leaned on sexist remarks rather than science. She kept her cool in public, and she testified to a Senate committee in 1963.
Now the harm check. Nothing turned up in her words or acts against LGBTQ+ people, women, migrants or anyone else. Her whole career was about protecting wildlife and people from poisons. She said it was not her contention that chemical insecticides must never be used, which is a long way from the total ban her critics accuse her of wanting.
The good stuff is the legacy. The book is credited with helping lead to the EPA, the first Earth Day in 1970 and the 1972 DDT ban. A wildlife refuge in Maine carries her name, and her Silver Spring home is a National Historic Landmark.