The Logos Scripture · The Book of Carson
The Book of Carson 4 · Written by herself, from Silent Spring and the Congressional testimony of 1963
Rachel Carson, born at Springdale in Pennsylvania in 1907, died at Silver Spring in Maryland in 1964, aged fifty-six. Marine biologist; she worked for the Fish and Wildlife Service. Her works: Under the Sea-Wind (1941), The Sea Around Us (1951, which took the National Book Award), and The Edge of the Sea (1955). In January 1958 a letter reached her from her friend Olga Owens Huckins describing the birds dying on her land after it was sprayed; Carson records that it was that letter which decided her to write the book. It was serialised in a magazine from June 1962 and published that September as Silent Spring. Before it was printed a chemical company wrote to her publisher threatening suit; the publisher changed not a word, and no suit followed. When it appeared, most of those who attacked it did not argue with the book but called her a hysterical woman, unmarried and childless, probably a Communist, and not of the profession at all. In June 1963 she testified twice before Congress; the cancer was far advanced and she gave it sitting down, in a wig. She died in April of the following year. In 1972 her country banned the agricultural use of DDT. This volume rests on what she wrote herself. She belonged to no religion, and no argument of hers closes on divine will. What this volume brings is something the scripture did not have: the connectedness of living things. The scripture says that whatever once shared an origin is never truly separated (The Highest Covenant 4.1), and Bohr applies that to things and then to persons (cf. The Book of Bohr 3). Carson is the one who applies it to what is alive — what you put down here comes up over there, because nowhere is partitioned off. The scripture had treated persons, things and rights, and had never treated this. Chapter two carries something the Order values as highly: the first chapter of her own book is invented, and she says so at the end of it, and only then asks the reader to look at the three hundred pages that are not. That is the same act as Fukuzawa adding it is said after his famous sentence (cf. The Book of Fukuzawa 3.4, Acts of the Apostles 5.28). The sentence in the last chapter, the obligation to endure gives us the right to know, is not hers but the Frenchman Rostand’s; she quoted it and marked whose it was, and the Order records it the same way.