Written by: Jenn Xu
Image from massivesci.com
On May 27th, 1907, in Springfield, Pennsylvania, Rachel Louise Carson was born. Little did anyone know that she would be one of the most influential figures in the global environmental movement. Not only did she author an impactful scientific book on the harms of pesticides, but she is also credited as being the founder of the field of study of environmental toxicology.
Carson enjoyed literature very much. As a child, some of her favorite works were those of Beatrix Potter, the author of The Tale of Peter Rabbit. Carson especially liked stories that involved animals and often wrote them when she was a young girl. She enjoyed literature so much that she’d majored in English at first, but eventually switched to biology. Despite her appreciation for literature, she was also born a lover of science. She grew up with passions in biology and marine life and continued to pursue her scientific studies throughout her life.
Carson studied at Chatham University, then known as the Pennsylvania College for Women Rachel. Eventually she moved on to study zoology and genetics at Johns Hopkins University in 1929. After her undergraduate studies, she worked part-time at a laboratory to pay for her graduate school tuition. She earned her master’s degree in zoology and many decades later, eventually secured a full-time position of aquatic biologist and editor in chief at the U.S. Bureau of Fisheries as only one of two women to ever hold a full-time position there at the time.
Rachel Carson was an incredibly diligent worker. Following several decades of work in the scientific field, Carson was officially a professor at the Maryland and Johns Hopkins University. Moreover, she’d written several award-winning books on topics that eventually became fundamental influences to the environmental movements of the 1960s and 90s. Her most notable work, Silent Sprint, was written to argue against the use of the harmful pesticide DDT. At the time, DDT was known as a radical new pesticide that could kill all pests in an instant. However, with its power came many side effects that proved to be toxic environmental stressors. Silent Spring became a revolutionary publication that scientists mention even to this day.
Carson’s dedication to the environmental sciences earned her the title of Mother of Environmental Toxicology. Silent Spring became the work that created the distinct field of study, albeit that not many are aware of. Not all universities in the world offer courses in environmental toxicology, despite it being a very important field of study. Environmental toxicology is the study of the adverse effects of chemical toxins on living organisms.
An example of one of the careers environmental toxicologists can go into is becoming an environmental health analyst. This career is concerned with studying harmful toxins and how they interact with and affect the environment through lab work, fieldwork, and computer modeling. Typically, it requires 6 years of formal education—4 for a bachelor of science and approximately 2 for a master of science. Environmental health analysts are usually employed by private companies to help develop products and perform safety tests on them. Sometimes, federal and provincial governments hire them to perform safety tests using chemical products on the environment and to help them develop safety regulations regarding harmful chemicals. In this line of work, some of the day to day tasks include reading up on scientific literature to increase knowledge on current developments in toxicology, speaking with clients to help them understand environmental health issues, developing methods of the implementation of sampling and testing of chemicals in the environment, and presenting environmental findings to clients professionals.
Environmental toxicology, although unknown to most, is one of the cornerstones of the connection between science and today’s society. There’s still a long way to go before we can win the fight against harming the Earth with today’s advancements, but we can still give thanks to Rachel Carson for being a formidable ally in this battle for the environment.
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