Branner Blog

One hundred years ago on May 27th, Rachel Carson was born in rural Pennsylvania. Author of three classic books about the sea, she also helped launch the environmental movement of the late 1960’s and early 1970’s, with the publication of Silent Spring in 1962. Every literate denizen of the earth should read this book, as relevant today as it it was forty years ago. Check out the online bookclub, commemorating the anniversary of her birth; a website put up by the Fish and Wildlife Service, for whom she worked for many years; and another informative site.

The plaque in the thumbnail photo is attached to a rock (granite?) on the banks of the Sheepscot River in Newagen, Maine, where Carson’s ashes were scattered, following her death, too young, from breast cancer. It reads, in part:

RACHEL CARSON
Writer, Ecologist, Champion of the Natural World
1907-1964