12-25-12: Remembering Silent Spring

You are missing some Flash content that should appear here! Perhaps your browser cannot display it, or maybe it did not initialize correctly.

30074 Carson DDT 1225.mp3

This segment originally aired October 9, 2012.

It’s been 50 years since Rachel Carson’s book Silent Spring launched the modern environmental movement. She wrote her alarum about pesticides from her home in Silver Spring, after she had retired from her career as a writer and editor at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and she was fighting breast cancer that would take her life just a year-and-a-half after Silent Spring was published.

Some of the book used research on DDT that had been conducted at the U.S. Geological Survey’s Patuxent Wildlife Research Center near Laurel. In the building where Rachel Carson used to pore over research findings, we sat with research scientists Chan Robbins, Gary Heinz, and Matt Perry, to talk about how Patuxent shaped Silent Spring. Between them, they have over 140 years of experience working at Patuxent.

For more on Rachel Carson, you can check out William Souder's new biography of Rachel Carson, On a Farther Shore.

Dr. Chan Robbins is now 94; he is scientist emeritus at Patuxent and comes in to volunteer three days a week. Once again, Dr. Robbins will be doing the Christmas Bird Count at Patuxent; his first Christmas Bird Count was done in…1934. You can hear Nathan Sterner’s adventure on the Christmas Bird Count, which we aired last week, here.