Today’s Google Doodle features Marine Biologist Rachel Carson, standing amidst a vast expanse of marine and plant life and birds with a notebook, a backpack and a pair of binoculars drawn in Vector style. Carson was a renowned author who can be credited for launching the modern global environment movement. She was the inspiration behind the creation of the US Environmental Protection Agency, a government agency focused on protecting human health and the environment. She initiated the cause against widespread use of chemical pesticides, harmful for both the Ecosystem and Human Health. Though she began her career as a marine biologist, she became a full time writer in the 1950s and was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of freedom by then American President Jimmy Carter.
On her 107th birth anniversary, Kindle 5/Five brings you the list of five books she authored, which embodies her study on the environment and her fight against chemical pesticides.
SILENT SPRING
It took four years for Rachel to complete the Silent Spring book which describes how DDT entered the food chain and gets accumulated in the fatty tissues of animals, including human beings, and causes cancer and genetic damage. The book in one if its most haunting chapters, “A Fable for Tomorrow,” depicts a nameless American town where all life form has been “silenced” by the insidious effects of DDT.
UNDER THE SEA WIND
One of her personal favorites, Under the Sea Wind, is her first book of her best selling trilogy. The book established Carson as one of the most prescient and influential observer of the environment. The edition includes the beautiful line drawings by Howard Frech, which takes you beneath the sea waves portraying an intimate connection with wonderful sea world.
THE SEA AROUND US
The Sea Around Us won Rachel a National Book Award in the year 1952, and made Carson an international voice for the public understanding of science. The book is based on post-World War II effects on geographical and oceanographic life in and around the sea. It also closely observes and narrates the processes that formed the earth, the moon, and the oceans.
THE EDGE OF THE SEA
Houghton Mifflin Company published the book, The Edge of the Sea, in the year 1955. The book, which is the last book of her trilogy, is a practical guide to identifying the inhabitants of the sea, which we find in the marshes, tide pools, and shallows that border it. Carson describes in her book, the tide lines of the eastern seacoast; the rocky shores, the sandy dunes, and the coral reefs.
THE SENSE OF WONDER
Rachel Carson was only known for writing four books but many do not know that her last book, The Sense of Wonder, was published posthumously. The book was originally written as a magazine article in the 1950s, called “Help Your Child to Wonder”. The Book documents Carson’s philosophy that adults need to nurture ‘a child’s inborn sense of wonder about the natural world’.
