Rachel Carson, the one who told the story of the ocean
In the United States, she is famous for her book "Silent Spring," which led to the banning of certain pesticides, such as DTT, in the 1960s. But Rachel Carson's (1907-1964) great passion in life was the sea. She devoted unforgettable pages to it, inviting us to reconsider our relationship with the living.
[This article was first published on our site on July 24, 2022, and republished on June 20, 2025]
When she was still a young girl, marine biologist Rachel Carson discovered a shell fossil while surveying her family's hillside property in Springdale, Pennsylvania [in the northeastern United States]. Those who knew her at the time would later say that this relic so sparked her imagination that she was immediately drawn to the sea. What was this ancient creature, and what might the world it came from have been like?
At the time, Rachel Carson had never seen the sea, but that didn't stop her from developing a passion for it. She first studied biology, then zoology, before taking a job as a writer at the U.S. Bureau of Fisheries [the forerunner of today's U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service]. This was a rather unusual career path for a young woman in the 1920s and 1930s, reflecting a great deal of curiosity and also the tireless patronage of her mother, Maria, who had instilled in her children a love of wildlife, regularly taking them on walks to discover botany and birds. Rachel Carson absorbed all these lessons and, throughout her life, retained the deep conviction that wonder should be at the heart of any relationship with nature.
During the
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