The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service on May 27 will join the country in celebrating the centennial birthday of Rachel Carson, a one-time Service employee whose pioneering book Silent Spring is often credited with sparking the modern environmental movement.
In honor of the centennial, the Service is hosting events around the country and has developed special environmental education programs and exhibits. For a complete list of programs and events, visit http://www.fws.gov/rachelcarson.
"Rachel Carson is one of our true conservation heroes," said Service Director H. Dale Hall. "The Service continues to embrace the principles she championed -- the importance of sound science, respect for all living things, and the need to connect people, especially children, with nature. Perhaps the greatest gift she left us is the notion that one person, working with passion and a strong sense of purpose, can indeed make a difference."
Carson was born and grew up in a rural Pennsylvania community where she spent a great deal of time exploring the forests and streams near her familys farm. She was first published at age 10 in a childrens magazine dedicated to the work of young writers.
In 1925, Carson entered Pennsylvania College for Women as an English major but later switched to biology. Upon graduation from Pennsylvania College, she was awarded a scholarship to complete graduate work in biology at Johns Hopkins University in Maryland -- a rare accomplishment for a woman in 1929.
Carsons dual skills in writing and biology led to a job with the U.S. Bureau of Fisheries (now the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service) in 1935. During her 15-year career with the Service, she wrote numerous pamphlets and bulletins on conservation, including the "Conservation in Action" series, which eloquently describes the National Wildlife Refuge System's role in protecting the environment and maintaining wildlife resources for future generations. Carsons first book, Under the Sea-Wind (1941), highlighted her unique ability to present complex scientific material in clear poetic language that captivated readers and sparked their interest in the natural world.
Her second book, The Sea Around Us (1951), remained on The New York Times best-seller list for 81 weeks. Its success prompted Carson to resign her position with the Service in 1952 to write full time. She eventually returned to the germ of an idea, about the role of pesticides in the environment, 10 years after she left government service. The final result was Silent Spring (1962), a groundbreaking workthat urged the nation to consider the effects of chemicals on the environment. Silent Spring was informed by nearly two decades of field and laboratory research carried out by Service biologists to study the effects of pesticides on wildlife, primarily birds and their eggs. The book eventually prompted the federal government to order a complete review of pesticide policy, and Carson was asked to testify before a Congressional committee. As a direct result of that review, the use of DDT was banned in the United States in 1972. The action has widely been cited as one of the primary reasons bald eagle populations in the lower 48 states have climbed from an all-time low of 417 nesting pairs in 1963 to an estimated high of 9,789 breeding pairs today.
Five years after Carsons death in 1964, the Fish and Wildlife Service named one of its refuges near her summer home on the coast of Maine as the Rachel Carson National Wildlife Refuge to honor her memory. Today her legacy continues through the work of the Services Environmental Contaminants program and an increasingly knowledgeable American public concerned about the health of their local environment.
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is the principal federal agency responsible for conserving, protecting and enhancing fish, wildlife and plants and their habitats for the continuing benefit of the American people. The Service manages the 97-million-acre National Wildlife Refuge System, which encompasses 547 national wildlife refuges, thousands of small wetlands and other special management areas. It also operates 70 national fish hatcheries, 64 fishery resources offices and 81 ecological services field stations. The agency enforces federal wildlife laws, administers the Endangered Species Act, manages migratory bird populations, restores nationally significant fisheries, conserves and restores wildlife habitat such as wetlands, and helps foreign and Native American tribal governments with their conservation efforts. It also oversees the Federal Assistance program, which distributes hundreds of millions of dollars in excise taxes on fishing and hunting equipment to state fish and wildlife agencies.
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