RACHEL'S LEGACY - Rachel Carson’s groundbreaking ‘Silent Spring’ was inspired by Duxbury woman

[friendly_iconoclast]

http://ledger.southofboston.com/articles/2007/05/26/news/news03.txt

RACHEL'S LEGACY - Rachel Carson’s groundbreaking ‘Silent Spring’ was inspired by Duxbury woman
By ELENI HIMARAS
The Patriot Ledger
At sunrise, a symphony of birdsong breaks out on Powder Point Avenue in Duxbury.

Robins, finches, wrens and catbirds forage through thick green underbrush on a verdant lawn peppered with bright purple flowers and sweet-smelling honeysuckle.

Fifty years ago, the owner of that property, Olga Owens Huckins, walked out into her yard to silence.

Corpses of birds were scattered around the lawn, dead from an indiscriminate aerial spraying of the pesticide DDT meant to kill mosquitoes.

Outraged, the 57-year-old literary editor wrote a letter to the Boston Herald and sent a copy to her friend, Rachel Carson. Her account of dead birds with ‘‘splayed claws ... drawn up to their breasts in agony’’ moved Carson to action. She dropped the children’s book she had been writing and began five years of research for her groundbreaking and influential work, ‘‘Silent Spring.’’

And here I thought Deluxebury was all about real estate prices and heavy drinking!

Seriously, this letter had as much, if not more, impact as Albert Einstein and Leo
Szilard's letter to FDR warning that uranium could be used to make a bomb.

[AnnieBW]

1. Rachel Carson went to my Alma Mater

Chatham University (which used to be Chatham College, and Pennsylvania College for Women). She majored in biology and English. So, even as a young woman, she was looking for a way to get the message out about the environment.

For more information on the Rachel Carson Institute: http://www.chatham.edu/centers/institutes/rci/home_flash.html