This morning we read another chapter of Girls Who Looked Under Rocks: The Lives of Six Pioneering Naturalists. After Frances Hamerstorm comes Rachel Carson. Here’s my written narration.

Rachel Carson was born not long after the turn of the twentieth century. She grew up in Pennsylvania, where her mother encouraged her to study nature, including looking at spider webs and moths at night. At school she was teased for being poor and wearing ill-fitting clothes and she was too shy to fight back. She loved to write and had her first story published in a children’s magazine called St. Nicholas at age ten. After graduating from high school Rachel Carson attended a women’s college. A science professor encouraged her to study biology and she applied for a scholarship at a marine laboratory. She discovered that she felt at home standing ankle deep in the ocean and ended up earning an advanced degree. Rachel took a job at a government environmental agency in Washington DC, where she faced some animosity as the only woman working there who was not a secretary. To earn more money to help her widowed mother, her sister, and her sister’s children, she began writing books on the side. After the publication of her second book she was able to buy a house by the ocean in Maine.

In the late 1950s a friend wrote to Rachel to tell her about the robins that were dying after a field was sprayed to kill mosquitos. She knew she had to do something. Five years later, she published Silent Spring, a book that warned of the dangers of pesticides. As she had expected, chemical manufacturers fought back and tried to discredit her. Even though she was battling cancer, Rachel traveled around and gave lectures. Before she died two years later, some pesticides had been banned and other environmental protection laws had been put in place.