Rachel Carson

📍613 Marion Avenue, Springdale, Pennsylvania 15144, USA

“I grew up in Springdale, Pennsylvania, a small industrial town on the Allegheny River north of Pittsburgh, where the air smelled of industry and the river ran brown with the outfall of upstream factories. My mother Maria was a teacher who deeply loved the natural world and passed that love to me entirely — she would take me into the fields and woods around Springdale to look at birds and insects and plants, and I understood from very early that the living world was extraordinary and worth attending to. I studied biology at the Pennsylvania College for Women and then zoology at Johns Hopkins, and spent most of my career at the US Fish and Wildlife Service. It was the river I grew up beside and the fields I explored as a child that gave me the essential conviction of Silent Spring: that the natural world was not a resource to be used but a community to be lived in.”

Sources: Lear, L. Rachel Carson: Witness for Nature (1997), Henry Holt; Carson, R. Silent Spring (1962), Houghton Mifflin; Freeman, M. Always, Rachel: The Letters of Rachel Carson and Dorothy Freeman (1995), Beacon Press