Rachel Carson was born on May 27, 1907, and grew up on the outskirts of Springdale, sixteen miles from Pittsburgh. Rachel Carson sat astride a mountaintop and imagined herself at the bottom of the sea that made the mountain.

Now I lie back with half closed eyes and try to realize that I am at the bottom of another ocean-an ocean of air on which the hawks are sailing. She was already piecing together the first inklings of what would become her final legacy as both scientist and author: public documentation of widespread ecological damage from pesticide-spraying programs that broadcast inherently toxic substances across the landscape, sabotaging, among other things, the ability of predators atop the food chain to reproduce.īut her field notes from that particular day on the mountain reveal that she was not up there solely to tabulate the number of raptors flying by:Īnd always in these Appalachian highlands there are reminders of those ancient seas that more than once lay over all this land these whitened limestone rocks on which I am sitting-these, too, were formed under that Paleozoic ocean, of the myriad tiny skeletons of creatures that drifted in its waters. By the time Briggs and Carson ascended to the north overlook in fall 1945-mere weeks after the dropping of two atomic bombs ended World War II- Carson had already read classified papers documenting harm to wildlife from exposure to DDT and other untested wartime chemicals that were now receiving a hero’s welcome in American society. Balanced on a rocky outcrop, black leather jacket open to the wind, she scans the horizon with a pair of leather-strapped binoculars, the whole of Berks County, Pennsylvania, unfurling before her-forest and valley, field and mountain-like a verse from a Pete Seeger song.Īn officially designated sanctuary for raptors along the Appalachian flyway, Hawk Mountain had become, by the mid-1930s, the spot in Pennsylvania to witness the annual fall migration of hawks and eagles. In the Hawk Mountain photo of 1945, Rachel Carson is both beautiful and at ease.

The sea around us by rachel carson