Rachel Carson. (Courtesy photo)

Adopted by his great aunt at the age of five, Roger Christie still has vivid memories of the childhood he spent with author and scientist Rachel Carson, most often remembered for her seminal book on the environment, Silent Spring. Christie, who has lived in Harvard for many years with his wife, Wendy Sisson, and their two boys, is pleased with the recognition Carson is receiving in the year that would have marked her 100th birthday. Carson has been the subject of several retrospective news stories examining her impact on the environmental movement, as well as a number of commemorative celebrations designed to sustain her quiet but definitive legacy as an advocate of the natural world.

“I’m pleased because it brings her back into people’s consciousness. It’s kind of disheartening how many kids have never heard of her,” he said. “It’s also heartening how many people still care.”

Widely credited as one of the most important figures of the environmental movement, Carson was first and foremost a wonderful writer, Christie said. Trained as a marine biologist, Carson began her writing career working for the U.S. Bureau of Fisheries (later the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service). Turning research into lyric prose was Carson’s unique gift, and her three books on the ocean, Under the Sea-Wind, The Sea Around Us, and The Edge of the Sea, garnered a large popular following. “Her books on sea life often sat at the top of the bestseller list for 70 to 80 weeks in a row,” Christie noted. He always knew his aunt was an important person, he said, and her fame was a given throughout his childhood in Silver Spring, Maryland. Respite from the demands of her public career came during summers spent at their cottage in Maine. It was a simpler time, then, Christie said, and much more rustic. The cottage has remained in the family, however, and he and his family still enjoy the house exactly as Carson left it.

Carson changed her focus from marine biology to the impact of pesticides on the environment after a friend, Olga Owens Huckins, wrote to her about the impact of large-scale spraying near her home in Duxbury. Huckins asked Carson to use her influence to investigate pesticide use by the government, a cause she took on somewhat reluctantly, but to great effect. A review of Silent Spring on www.rachelcarson.org points out that Carson never took a stand against pesticide use in its entirety, but aimed to educate the public on the link between large-scale pesticide use and wildlife mortality. As a result of her research, Carson was asked to testify on pesticide use before President Kennedy’s Science Advisory Committee in 1963, just after the publication of Silent Spring. While often vilified by the chemical industry, Carson’s research is still widely regarded as some of the most important advocacy for the health of the global environment.

“She had a broader point than merely pesticides,” Christie said. “In all of these things, people have to be responsible and think of the ramifications. You can’t just blunder ahead willy nilly and hope things will work out.” He noted that if Carson were alive today, she would probably be very interested in the problem of global warming as well. “I think she would be at the forefront of that whole movement, because it has incredible implications for every part of the environment, especially the oceans and all the species who depend on the oceans.”

Halfway through the writing of the book, Carson was diagnosed with breast cancer. While she received the best care available at the time, Christie said, it was a race to finish the book before the disease eventually claimed her life at the age of 56. When she died, Christie said, he was just 12 years old. He left Silver Spring to go live with Paul Brooks, Carson’s publisher at Houghton Mifflin, and a Lincoln resident. It was there that he met Wendy, a family friend of the Brooks, he said, and one of the first people he met in the new community.

Christie has been asked to speak about the Carson legacy on a number of occasions recently, and will do so again at a centennial celebration at the Rachel Carson Wildlife Refuge in Wells, Maine, Saturday, June 9. He was recently interviewed for an in-depth news story for CBS, as well as a number of newspapers.

Asked why Carson continues as such a strong presence in American memory, Christie had a swift reply. “Because she was a great writer,” he said. “Above and beyond anything else, she was a truly great writer.”

For more information on Rachel Carson, visit www.rachelcarson.org. For more information on the Rachel Carson Wildlife Refuge and the centennial celebration, visit www.fws.gov/northeast/rachelcarson/events.html.

“We still talk in terms of conquest. We still haven’t become mature enough to think of ourselves as only a tiny part of a vast and incredible universe. Man’s attitude toward nature is today critically important simply because we have now acquired a fateful power to alter and destroy nature. 

“But man is a part of nature, and his war against nature is inevitably a war against himself. The rains have become an instrument to bring down from the atmosphere the deadly products of atomic explosions. Water, which is probably our most important natural resource, is now used and re-used with incredible recklessness. Now, I truly believe, that we in this generation, must come to terms with nature, and I think we’re challenged as mankind has never been challenged before to prove our maturity and our mastery, not of nature, but of ourselves.” 

—Rachel Carson, on CBS Reports, 1963