Our region is defined by our waters, and no one captured that love of life by the shore better than the iconic conservationist Rachel Carson.
“If there is poetry in my book about the sea, it is not because I deliberately put it there, but because no one could truthfully write about the sea and leave out poetry.”
Those are her words after receiving the National Book Award for The Sea Around Us in 1951. An exhibit at Yale’s Beinecke Library offers a glimpse at Carson’s life beyond what was in your school textbook — through handwritten manuscripts, letters, photos and more.
Of course, Carson’s best-known work is 1962’s Silent Spring. It was a total game changer. It exposed the devastating effects of pesticides, launched the modern environmental movement, and led to the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency.
“She was very much for citizen action, and for the individual, making a difference in any way they can. She certainly did that in her own work and her own life.”
That’s Carla Baricz. She co-curates the exhibit with James Kessenides. Both are librarians with Yale’s Library of Area Studies and Humanities.
“What we tried to do working with material objects and text, is to get closer to that understanding of Carson not just as a cultural figure, but her work in her own words," Baricz said.
“We have things ranging from notebooks, where you see her jottings in doing her research, to a lot of correspondence," Kessenides said. "She was a big letter writer to her, early drafts in manuscript form, whether handwritten or typewritten drafts of the books that ended up getting published. So, I think all of these help shed light both on her thinking, in terms of the subject matter, and on her style as a writer."
The idea of wonder starts off the exhibit and carries throughout — that sense of curiosity about the natural world that, for many people, begins in childhood. Carson captured that in one of her later works, A Sense of Wonder, published after her death from cancer in 1964.
“It was essentially an essay she wrote about her nephew, Roger Carson, and how she had gone for walks with him by the shore in Maine where she had a cottage every summer," Baricz said. "And it was very much championing the idea of paying close attention to the small things in one’s local landscape. What you encounter on walks, and then using that as a springboard for a bigger picture thinking about engaging with the environment.”
In the 1930s, Carson began working with what’s now known as the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
“At the time, the agency she worked for was called the U.S. Bureau of Fisheries. That agency itself was aware of what the U.S. government was using in the 1940s, and through the Second World War, in terms of various tools in its toolkit," Kessenides said. "One of which became DDT, which was discovered to have insecticidal properties. It's used by the U.S. military, and of course those working on the wildlife side. The U.S. government is beginning already then to get concerned about what effect this will have on the environment. So, she even pitches to Reader's Digest in the mid-1940s an article on DDT. They turned it down.”
The success of her book The Sea Around Us let her leave her job with the government, garner some fame, buy that cottage in Maine and become a full-time writer. By the 1950s, she returned to her concerns about DDT. She drew on contacts with the Audubon Society and the wildlife community to investigate issues such as declining raptor numbers in Pennsylvania, and dying maple trees in Vermont. As her research grew, she knew Silent Spring was more than just an article.
"In1962, the year of Silent Spring, the book was published in September of that year, but in June, three important excerpts were published in The New Yorker, so people were already familiar…”
Kessenides points to a display case.
“...This is the book, and this is a handwritten copy of chapter one of the book. It’s a little different but would ultimately become the very powerful opening chapter of Silent Spring. So again, just a glimpse into that process, and the different revisions of that text.”
Those revisions produced a book that reached far beyond the scientific community. But the curators said it’s difficult to imagine anything having that kind of cultural impact today.
“I'm not even sure if it's possible for any single book to move the culture or the conversation anymore, just given the fragmentation of media, the emergence of the web, the emergence of social media," said Kessenides. "This was still a time, and something that we tried to convey, when a single magazine article or a single book could be a force for a wide swath of people.”
“One of the amazing things about Silent Spring is that people really read it — they read it cover to cover. There were multiple print runs, and there was this kind of hunger for, you know, for the message of Silent Spring in book form, and I don't know if that would be the case today," said Baricz. "There's certainly that hunger for that message, but I don't know if people have the attention spans, or if they are used to, sort of, reading an argument through in that way.”
You can check out the exhibit through October 4 at Yale’s Beinecke Library.
