Lesson Twelve
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　　A Friend of the Environment
　　John Hartley Early Kinship with Nature
　　A little girl tramping around in the Pennsylvania woods
　　near her home feels close to the birds and plants and animals.
　　She is at ease with them.
　　They are, in a way, her close friends.
　　The little girl, Kke many people,
　　feels that these wonders of Nature are precious and permanent.
　　Rachel Carson continued to feel that way for much of her life
　　"It was pleasant to believe," she wrote later,"
　　that much of Nature was forever beyond the tampering reach of man.
　　He might cut down the forests and dam the streams,
　　but the clouds and the rain and the stream of life were God's.
　　It was comforting to suppose
　　that the stream of life would flow on
　　through time in whatever course God had given it
　　without interference by one of the drops in that stream
　　man Silent Spring a Warning to Mankind
　　But she found out that she was wrong.
　　As a scientist, she learned with sadness that little in Nature
　　is truly beyond the"tampering reach of man."
　　Then, angrily aware of the harsh facts concerning the present
　　and future dangers to the environment,
　　she used her great skills as a writer
　　to sound a startling warning to mankind.
　　Silent Spring,published in 1962,
　　showed quite clearly that man was endangering him self
　　and everything else on this planet
　　by his indiscriminate use of chemical pesticides.
　　As her title suggests,Miss Carson was saying
　　that there might come a springtime that would indeed be silent.
　　It would be silent because the birds as well as other creatures and plants
　　would have been destroyed by the man made poisons
　　used to kill crop threatening insects.
　　When she was that little girl in Pennsylvania,
　　Rachel Carson never would have believed
　　that years latershe would write a scientific book
　　that would stir up so much controversy.
　　The book created the enthusiasm for"protecting the environment"
　　that has become so commonplace today.
　　Because she had always been such an avid and appreciative reader,
　　her dream when she started college was to become an imaginative writer.
　　She wanted to be one perhaps like the English poet John Masefield.
　　His fine words had fired her imagination about the sea,
　　which she had never seen.
　　When she was a sophomore, though, she took a course in biology.
　　It was there she discovered the wonder
　　and excitement of scientific study of those animals she had learned to know
　　and admire as a child tramping through the woods.
　　Redirected Toward After finishing college,
　　she did research and taught in various universities and government agencies
　　At the same time,she did indeed become acquainted with the sea
　　that Masefield had written about.
　　She learned "the gull's way and the whale's
　　way where the wind's like a whetted knife."
　　Like any good scientist,
　　she took extensive notes about her studies,
　　whether her focus of the moment was a crab in Chesapeake Bay
　　or a turtle in the Caribbean.
　　Ultimately she wrote about the sea.
　　She wrote about it not only in formal academic reports
　　but also in a bookthat informed and thrilled laymen around the world.
　　The Sea Around Us,published in 1951,
　　has been translated into more than thirty languages
　　and was on the best seller list for more than eighty consecutive weeks.
　　Rachel Carson, a scientist with the magic touch of a poet,
　　shared her love of the ocean and its creatures with all mankind.
　　Her style was clear but lively,informative but not preachy,

　　and for most readers truly exhilarating.
　　Although the oceans may cover seven tenths of the earth's surface,
　　few of us know much about them.
　　The Sea Around Us was a delightful antidote to our ignorance.
　　Her Concern over Pesticides
　　In the decade after the publication of The Sea Around Us
　　she continued with her research and writing.
　　There were other books and numerous magazine articles.
　　Most of them dealt with the major love of her life the sea.
　　However, because she was a true scientist and an aware human being,
　　she knew that everything on this planet is connected to everything else.
　　Thus, she became increasingly alarmed by the development and use of DDT
　　and other pesticides of its type.
　　These chemicals, she knew, do not break down in the soil.
　　Instead,they tend to be endlessly recycled in the food chains
　　on which birdsand animals and man himself are completely dependent.
　　The Poisonous CycleOne might guess
　　that at this time Carson the readermight have reminded Carson the scientist
　　of some passagesin Shakespeare's most famous play.
　　Prince Hamlet used revoltingly grisly images
　　in vicious baiting of his hated uncle
　　when he told him that in nature's food chain
　　We fatten other creatures so that they can feed us,
　　and we fatten ourselves to ultimately feed maggots.
　　The worms eat the king and the beggar alike;
　　they are simply two dishes but the same meal for the worm.
　　The worm that has eaten the king
　　may be used by a man(who could be a beggar) for fishing,
　　and he, in turn,eats the fish that ate the worm.
　　In this way,a king can pass through the guts of a beggar.
　　Rachel Carson knew of this poisonous cycle.
　　And she knew now,
　　as her own observa tions were confirmed by fellow scientists all over the country
　　that this "worm" now carried a heavy concentration of poison.
　　It could be passed on to fish, to other animals,
　　to their food supply,and to men and women and children throughout the earth
　　In spite of fierce opposition from the chemical industry,
　　from powerful government agencies,
　　and from farmer organizations,
　　she persisted in her research and writing.
　　Then in 1962 she published Silent Spring.
　　The book exploded into the public consciousness.
　　It received great praise from, some,
　　great criticism from others.
　　The little girl from the Pennsylvania woods now approaching middle age,
　　had fired a major salvo in the battle for the environment.