Rachel Carson: Saint or Sinner?

Abstract

Those who honored Rachel Carson after her death in 1964 knew how hard she had struggled to warn against human abuse of the Earth. In memory of her heroic efforts and her inspiring prose, they initiated a process that one scholar compared to a “secular canonization,” inspired by a vision of “Saint Rachel of the Silent Spring” (Howarth, 2005, p. 42). That view did not go long unchallenged. A range of conservatives associated Carson with the two ‘isms’ of the 1960s that galled them most: feminism and environmentalism. They seemed unaware that Carson resisted efforts to link her to the feminists, preferring to stress her reputation as a writer and scientist. All the same, she was unabashedly proud of her contributions to the popularity of environmentalism and the science of ecology.2