Robert Ellsberg’s Blessed Among Us: Day by Day with Saintly Witnesses; Volume 2 is now available from Liturgical Press.
“Those who contemplate the beauty of the earth find reserves of strength that will endure. . . . There is something infinitely healing in the repeated refrains of nature—the assurance that dawn comes after night, and spring after winter.”
Rachel Carson
Environmentalist (1907–1964)
The publication in 1962 of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring created a sensation. Her title was inspired by the absence of birdsong, an effect of the widespread use of pesticides like DDT. While selling two million copies, Carson’s book was fiercely attacked by the chemical industry. Yet many credit her book with the awakening of modern environmental consciousness.
Raised on her family farm in Springdale, Pennsylvania, Carson trained as a marine biologist and published several acclaimed books on the life of oceans. But with Silent Spring she spelled out the destructive impact of human actions on the earth and the threat they posed to our own health and welfare. Testifying in 1963 before a Senate committee, she
noted the carcinogenic properties of many chemicals (without noting that she herself was suffering from the cancer that would claim her life on April 14, 1964).
Though Carson made no explicit reference to faith, she was moved by a deep sense of wonder and respect for the earth and its creatures—and a conviction that humans must not ignore their own fragile bonds with nature. How differently might we see, she wondered, if we asked ourselves: “What if I had never seen this before? What if I knew I would never see it again?”
In 1980 Carson was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom. In 2001, the use of DDT was banned throughout the world.
