Martha Walden
If we could look up the term, “woman environmentalist” in an illustrated dictionary, we’d probably find a picture of Rachel Carson. The trouble with icons, however, is that they tend to eclipse everyone else. Before researching this article I couldn’t name a single woman before Carson who realized that we needed to protect the natural world from the triumph of industrial progress. Here are a few to commemorate during Women’s History Month.
Anna Botsford Comstock, born in 1854, is one of the earliest female environmentalists. After years of illustrating her husband’s entomology textbooks, she attended Cornell to get a degree in natural history. Then she wrote and illustrated some of her own influential books about seeds, plants, rocks, soil, and denizens of earth, air and water, including insects. Comstock’s joy of discovery and belief in the principles of observation often translated well to school curricula. Published in 1911, her Handbook of Nature Studies is still in use today.
We’ve all heard of John Muir but what about Margaret Murie? She grew up in Alaska, which may help explain why her idea of a honeymoon involved 500 miles on dogsled. Luckily, her husband, a biologist, was pretty tough too. The two of them divided their time between studying caribou migration in Alaska and studying elk migration in Wyoming. If it weren’t for the Muries there might not be any Arctic National Wildlife Refuge or Wilderness Act. After her husband’s death, Murie carried on for forty more years and met with both President Johnson and President Clinton.
If you’re a birder, you’re more likely than most of us to know who Rosalie Barrow Edge was. She read a pamphlet in 1929 about how hunters with modern sophisticated rifles of the time were killing thousands of birds, and how the Audubon Society had decided to not take a stance against it. She lost no time crashing a meeting of the board of directors of the National Association of Audubon Societies, much to their fury. Afterwards, she established Hawk Mountain Sanctuary on a ridgetop in Pennsylvania and hired a warden to run off hunters. Its staff have recorded daily bird counts all these years and you can visit there to this day.
So guess who came to visit the sanctuary? Rachel Carson. Silent Spring, that famous book, made use of data from Hawk Mountain as evidence of the toll of DDT. Despite my admiration of those who came before, I must say that Carson is the biggest hero of them all. Besides writing the book that catalyzed numerous federal environmental laws, not to mention the Environmental Protection Agency, she did so while caring for her invalid mother and a grandnephew whom she adopted. Suffering from metastasized breast cancer, she feared she would die before finishing the book about “the never-ending stream of chemicals . . . acting upon us directly and indirectly, separately and collectively.” She hid her illness, testified before Congress about her findings, and debated chemical industry spokesmen on CBS Reports – a wig covering her loss of hair. If she’d lived to write another book, it would have been about the “startling alteration of climate” she already detected in the sixties. If that unborn book had been as successful as Silent Spring, the U.S. might have become a true superpower – a climate leader – and who knows what world we’d live in today?