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Look up pictures of rachel carson6/29/2023 ![]() ![]() Such images often showed the author outdoors, in the process of beachcombing, birding, or tide-pooling. ![]() The latter figure, in fact, resembles publicity images of Carson that had been circulating on book jackets, advertisements, and magazine profiles ever since the 1951 publication of The Sea Around Us. One, clad in the outlandish hat and dress of a socialite, cradles a few books in her arms as the other, in a less glamorous ensemble of trench coat, baseball cap, and sunglasses, contemplates the horizon. 3 The image shows two women on the deck of a cruise ship facing a picturesque sunset. ![]() Zimmer throws a humorous light onto the often all-too-stern subject of American nature writing. Following closely on the heels of two lyrical meditations on the ecology of the shoreline-Carson's The Edge of the Sea (1955) and Anne Morrow Lindbergh's A Gift from the Sea (1955)-cartoonist F. However, a cartoon that appeared in the 15 January, 1956 edition of the New York Times Book Review, suggests that the environmental awakening created by Carson's oeuvre in the 1950s may be surprisingly different from what we have previously imagined. But the unarticulated assumption in most critical readings of Carson is that her words reached readers very much like ourselves, all too ready to hear and to believe in the ecocentric message that we find so deeply engaging in her work. But amid the discussions of Carson's extraordinary influence and reputation, an important question often goes unexplored: what did Carson's readers actually do with her books? Alex Lockwood's recent article, describing Silent Spring's powerful mobilization of “public feelings” against a mid-century culture which relentlessly individualized affect, speaks powerfully to Carson's ability to link the private world of reading with the public realm of politics. 1 Lear's epithet seems particularly apt since, as she points out, Carson's entire literary career-including the three bestselling books on marine life she published before Silent Spring-was devoted to articulating and championing an ecological worldview to which few of her readers had ever really been exposed. Its author, who was hailed in her time as everything from a modern-day Harriet Beecher Stowe to a dangerous communist threat, has been the subject of numerous biographies which have described her variously as a “witness for nature” (Linda Lear, 1997), a “gentle subversive” (Mark Lytle, 2007), and, most recently, an unlikely literary crusader caught up in a political earthquake of postwar politics (William Souder, 2012). It is a work celebrated for many things: its deft blending of science and poetry, its trenchant analysis of the corporate-sponsored research that encouraged Americans to spray first and ask questions later, and the critical role it played in catalyzing the environmental movement in the United States. Silent Spring, Rachel Carson's ground-breaking literary exposé about the dangers of synthetic pesticides, turns 51 this year. Yet they also reveal much about our contemporary relationship to the world's oceans, which remain sites of both enduring wonder and extraordinary exploitation. This commodification of the ocean, and of Carson's ecocentric message, both enabled and frustrated her attempts to promote ecological literacy. As new technologies allowed military and scientific researchers to see deeper into the oceanic depths than ever before, images of the open ocean were domesticated through consumer markets into viewable, readable, and even wearable forms. ![]() While these items inspired and expressed the “sense of wonder” that was critical to Carson's ecological aesthetic, I argue, they also subsumed the new “frontier” of the world's oceans into the technological imperialism of the post-World War II United States. This essay builds upon that idea, showing how Carson's The Sea Around Us (1951) and The Edge of the Sea (1955) not only shaped public understandings of ocean ecology, but also spurred a public passion for all things oceanographic, best embodied in a wave of “Carsonalia”-consumer items and experiences ranging from hats, to Book of the Month Club editions, to liner notes for the NBC Symphony's recording of Debussy's La Mer. Recent scholarship on the work of the great nature writer, Rachel Carson, posits that her landmark book, Silent Spring (1962)-often credited with igniting the modern environmental movement-is best understood in the context of her earlier, extraordinarily popular publications on the natural history of the oceans, which helped establish her as a talented and trustworthy translator of scientific concepts into literary prose. ![]()
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