專八人文知識需知的美國名人--蕾切爾.卡遜

　　Rachel Carson

　　雷切爾·卡遜(Rachel Carson，1907年5月27日-1964年4月14日)，美國海洋生物學(xué)家，但她是以她的作品《寂靜的春天》(Silent Spring)引發(fā)了美國以至于全世界的環(huán)境保護(hù)事業(yè)。

　　卡遜出生于賓夕法尼亞州的斯普林達(dá)爾的農(nóng)民家庭，1929年 畢業(yè)于賓夕尼亞女子學(xué)院，1932年在霍普金斯大學(xué)獲動物學(xué)碩士學(xué)位。畢業(yè)后先后在霍普金斯大學(xué)和馬里蘭大學(xué)任教，并繼續(xù)在馬薩諸塞州的伍德豪海洋生物實驗室攻讀博士學(xué)位，但由于1932年她父親去世，老母需人贍養(yǎng)，她的經(jīng)濟(jì)條件不允許她繼續(xù)攻讀博士，只得在漁業(yè)管理局找到一份兼職工作，為電臺專有頻道廣播撰寫科技文章。1936年通過了嚴(yán)格的考試篩選，戰(zhàn)勝了當(dāng)時對婦女在行政部門工作的歧視，作為水生生物學(xué)家，成為漁業(yè)管理局第二位受聘的女性。她的部門主管有一次認(rèn)為她的文章太具有文學(xué)性，不能在廣播中使用，建議她投到雜志，居然被采用，出版社建議她整理出書，而她于1937年因為姐姐去世，還需要負(fù)責(zé)兩個外甥女，經(jīng)濟(jì)也需要支持，1941年出版第一部著作《海風(fēng)的下面》，描述海洋生物。

　　Rachel Louise Carson (May 27, 1907 – April 14, 1964) was an American marine biologist andnature writer whose writings are credited with advancing the global environmental movement.

　　Carson started her career as a biologist in the U.S. Bureau of Fisheries, and became a full-timenature writer in the 1950s. Her widely praised 1951 bestseller The Sea Around Us won her financialsecurity and recognition as a gifted writer. Her next book, The Edge of the Sea, and therepublished version of her first book, Under the Sea Wind, were also bestsellers. Together, her seatrilogy explores the whole of ocean life, from the shores to the surface to the deep sea.

　　現(xiàn)代環(huán)保運動之母

　　In the late 1950s, Carson turned her attention to conservation and the environmental problemscaused by synthetic pesticides. The result was Silent Spring (1962), which brought environmentalconcerns to an unprecedented portion of the American public. Silent Spring spurred a reversal innational pesticide policy—leading to a nationwide ban on DDT and other pesticides—and thegrassroots environmental movement the book inspired led to the creation of the EnvironmentalProtection Agency. Carson was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom byJimmy Carter.

　　Early life and education

　　Rachel Carson was born on May 27, 1907, on a small family farm near Springdale, Pennsylvania,just up the Allegheny River from Pittsburgh. An avid reader, she also spent a lot of time exploringaround her family's 65-acre (26 ha) farm. She began writing stories (often involving animals) at ageeight, and had her first story published at age eleven. She especially enjoyed the St. NicholasMagazine (which carried her first published stories), the works of Beatrix Potter, and the novels ofGene Stratton Porter, and in her teen years, Herman Melville, Joseph Conrad and Robert LouisStevenson. The natural world, particularly the ocean, was the common thread of her favoriteliterature. Carson attended Springdale's small school through tenth grade, then completed highschool in nearby Parnassus, Pennsylvania, graduating in 1925 at the top of her class of forty-fourstudents.

　　At the Pennsylvania College for Women (today known as Chatham University), as in high school,Carson was somewhat of a loner. She originally studied English, but switched her major to biologyin January 1928, though she continued contributing to the school's student newspaper andliterary supplement. Though admitted to graduate standing at Johns Hopkins University in 1928,she was forced to remain at the Pennsylvania College for Women for her senior year due tofinancial difficulties; she graduated magna cum laude in 1929. After a summer course at the MarineBiological Laboratory, she continued her studies in zoology and genetics at Johns Hopkins in the fallof 1929.

　　After her first year of graduate school, Carson became a part-time student, taking an assistantshipin Raymond Pearl's laboratory, where she worked with rats and Drosophila, to earn money fortuition. After false starts with pit vipers and squirrels, she completed a dissertation project on theembryonic development of the pronephros in fish. She earned a master's degree in zoology inJune 1932. She had intended to continue for a doctorate, but in 1934 Carson was forced to leaveJohns Hopkins to search for a full-time teaching position to help support her family. In 1935, herfather died suddenly, leaving Carson to care for her aging mother and making the financialsituation even more critical. At the urging of her undergraduate biology mentor Mary ScottSkinker, she settled for a temporary position with the U.S. Bureau of Fisheries, writing radio copyfor a series of weekly educational broadcasts entitled "Romance Under the Waters". The series offifty-two seven-minute programs focused on aquatic life and was intended to generate publicinterest in fish biology and in the work of the bureau—a task the several writers before Carson hadnot managed. Carson also began submitting articles on marine life in the Chesapeake Bay, basedon her research for the series, to local newspapers and magazines.

　　Carson's supervisor, pleased with the success of the radio series, asked her to write theintroduction to a public brochure about the fisheries bureau; he also worked to secure her the firstfull-time position that became available. Sitting for the civil service exam, she outscored all otherapplicants and in 1936 became only the second woman to be hired by the Bureau of Fisheries for afull-time, professional position, as a junior aquatic biologist.

　　The Edge of the Sea and transition to conservation work

　　In early 1953, Carson began library and field research on the ecology and organisms of the Atlanticshore. In 1955, she completed the third volume of her sea trilogy, The Edge of the Sea, whichfocuses on life in coastal ecosystems (particularly along the Eastern Seaboard). It appeared in TheNew Yorker in two condensed installments shortly before the October 26 book release. By thistime, Carson's reputation for clear and poetical prose was well-established; The Edge of the Seareceived highly favorable reviews, if not quite as enthusiastic as for The Sea Around Us.

　　Through 1955 and 1956, Carson worked on a number of projects—including the script for anOmnibus episode, "Something About the Sky"—and wrote articles for popular magazines. Her planfor the next book was to address evolution, but the publication of Julian Huxley's Evolution inAction—and her own difficulty in finding a clear and compelling approach to the topic—led her toabandon the project. Instead, her interests were turning to conservation. She considered anenvironment-themed book project tentatively entitled Remembrance of the Earth and becameinvolved with The Nature Conservancy and other conservation groups. She also made plans tobuy and preserve from development an area in Maine she and Freeman called the "Lost Woods".

　　Early in 1957, family tragedy struck a third time when one of the nieces she had cared for in the1940s died at the age of 31, leaving a five-year-old orphan son, Roger Christie. Carson took onthat responsibility, adopting the boy, alongside continuing to care for her aging mother; this took aconsiderable toll on Carson. She moved to Silver Spring, Maryland, to care for Roger, and much of1957 was spent putting their new living situation in order and focusing on specific environmentalthreats.

　　By fall 1957, Carson was closely following federal proposals for widespread pesticide spraying; theUSDA planned to eradicate fire ants, and other spraying programs involving chlorinatedhydrocarbons and organophosphates were on the rise. For the rest of her life, Carson's mainprofessional focus would be the dangers of pesticide overuse.

　　Research and writing

　　Starting in the mid-1940s, Carson had become concerned about the use of synthetic pesticides,many of which had been developed through the military funding of science since World War II. Itwas the USDA's 1957 fire ant eradication program, however, that prompted Carson to devote herresearch, and her next book, to pesticides and environmental poisons. The fire ant programinvolved aerial spraying of DDT and other pesticides (mixed with fuel oil), including the spraying ofprivate land. Landowners in Long Island filed a suit to have the spraying stopped, and many inaffected regions followed the case closely. Though the suit was lost, the Supreme Court grantedpetitioners the right to gain injunctions against potential environmental damage in the future; thislaid the basis for later successful environmental actions.[25]

　　The Washington, D.C. chapter of the Audubon Society also actively opposed such sprayingprograms, and recruited Carson to help make public the government's exact spraying practicesand the related research.[26] Carson began the four-year project of what would become SilentSpring by gathering examples of environmental damage attributed to DDT. She also attempted toenlist others to join the cause: essayist E. B. White, and a number of journalists and scientists. By1958, Carson had arranged a book deal, with plans to co-write with Newsweek science journalistEdwin Diamond. However, when The New Yorker commissioned a long and well-paid article on thetopic from Carson, she began considering writing more than simply the introduction andconclusion as planned; soon it was a solo project. (Diamond would later write one of the harshestcritiques of Silent Spring.)

　　As her research progressed, Carson found a sizable community of scientists who weredocumenting the physiological and environmental effects of pesticides. She also took advantage ofher personal connections with many government scientists, who supplied her with confidentialinformation. From reading the scientific literature and interviewing scientists, Carson found twoscientific camps when it came to pesticides: those who dismissed the possible danger of pesticidespraying barring conclusive proof, and those who were open to the possibility of harm and willingto consider alternative methods such as biological pest control.

　　By 1959, the USDA's Agricultural Research Service responded to the criticism of Carson and otherswith a public service film, Fire Ants on Trial; Carson characterized it as "flagrant propaganda" thatignored the dangers that spraying pesticides (especially dieldrin and heptachlor) posed to humansand wildlife. That spring, Carson wrote a letter, published in The Washington Post, that attributedthe recent decline in bird populations—in her words, the "silencing of birds"—to pesticide overuse.That was also the year of the "Great Cranberry Scandal": the 1957, 1958, and 1959 crops of U.S.cranberries were found to contain high levels of the herbicide aminotriazole (which caused cancer inlaboratory rats) and the sale of all cranberry products was halted. Carson attended the ensuingFDA hearings on revising pesticide regulations; she came away discouraged by the aggressivetactics of the chemical industry representatives, which included expert testimony that was firmlycontradicted by the bulk of the scientific literature she had been studying. She also wonderedabout the possible "financial inducements behind certain pesticide programs".

　　Research at the Library of Medicine of the National Institutes of Health brought Carson into contactwith medical researchers investigating the gamut of cancer-causing chemicals. Of particularsignificance was the work of National Cancer Institute researcher and founding director of theenvironmental cancer section Wilhelm Hueper, who classified many pesticides as carcinogens.Carson and her research assistant Jeanne Davis, with the help of NIH librarian Dorothy Algire,found evidence to support the pesticide-cancer connection; to Carson the evidence for thetoxicity of a wide array of synthetic pesticides was clear-cut, though such conclusions were verycontroversial beyond the small community of scientists studying pesticide carcinogenesis.

　　By 1960, Carson had more than enough research material, and the writing was progressingrapidly. In addition to the thorough literature search, she had investigated hundreds of individualincidents of pesticide exposure and the human sickness and ecological damage that resulted.However, in January, a duodenal ulcer followed by several infections kept her bedridden for weeks,greatly delaying the completion of Silent Spring. As she was nearing full recovery in March (just asshe was completing drafts of the two cancer chapters of her book), she discovered cysts in her leftbreast, one of which necessitated a mastectomy. Though her doctor described the procedure asprecautionary and recommended no further treatment, by December Carson discovered that thetumor was in fact malignant and the cancer had metastasized. Her research was also delayed byrevision work for a new edition of The Sea Around Us, and by a collaborative photo essay withErich Hartmann.Most of the research and writing was done by the fall of 1960, except for thediscussion of recent research on biological controls and investigations of a handful of newpesticides. However, further health troubles slowed the final revisions in 1961 and early 1962.

　　It was difficult finding a title for the book; "Silent Spring" was initially suggested as a title for thechapter on birds. By August 1961, Carson finally agreed to the suggestion of her literary agentMarie Rodell: Silent Spring would be a metaphorical title for the entire book—suggesting a bleakfuture for the whole natural world—rather than a literal chapter title about the absence of birdsong.[35] With Carson's approval, editor Paul Brooks at Houghton Mifflin arranged for illustrations byLouis and Lois Darling, who also designed the cover. The final writing was the first chapter, "A Fablefor Tomorrow", which was intended to provide a gentler introduction to what might otherwise be aforbiddingly serious topic. By mid-1962, Brooks and Carson had largely finished the editing, andwere laying the groundwork for promoting the book by sending the manuscript out to selectindividuals for final suggestions.