Rachel Carson 

Before Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth,” Greta Thunberg’s school strikes for climate and Leonardo DiCaprio’s multimillion-dollar donations for climate activism, there was Rachel Carson. 

Carson was a marine biologist, author and conservationist who made painstaking efforts to study humans’ effect on the natural world. 

Born in Pennsylvania and a graduate of Pennsylvania College for Women, Carson made inroads for women in the field of biology, earning a scholarship to complete her graduate work in marine biology at Johns Hopkins University. 

After her work at Johns Hopkins, Carson scored a position with the federal government — a great achievement for women at the time — at the U.S. Bureau of Fisheries. 

Over the years, Carson published several books, including “The Sea Around Us,” “The Edge of the Sea” and “Under the Sea Wind.” However, her most famous work, “Silent Spring,” is credited kick-starting the modern environmental movement.  

In “Silent Spring,” Carson details the ways in which widely used chemical pesticides, mainly DDT (dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane), were impacting the nation’s bird populations. Birds ingesting the poison were laying eggs with thinner shells, resulting in premature hatching. “Silent Spring” predicted that if the use of the chemical continued, several species would go extinct. 

The book stirred controversy, prompting the establishment of environmental groups against the use of DDT and subsequent lawsuits to fight its use. The substance eventually was banned in the early 1970s.

— Lauren Vella