Carson grew up in a simple family farm near Pennsylvania. She spent much of her childhood exploring around her family’s farm. An avid reader and talented writer, she won first prize for her story published in St. Nicholas Magazine at age 11. She favoured stories that involved the natural world, especially the ocean. Carson’s childhood experiences and developments laid the foundation stone for the passions of the rest of her life that would lead to her legacy.
Interest in Literature
“I read a great deal almost from infancy… and I suppose I must have realized someone wrote the books, and thought it would be fun to make up stories too.
Carson loved reading. Perhaps it was due to her mother’s keen intellect and influence that she started reading from a very young age. She started submitting stories to St. Nicholas Magazine, a monthly collection of reader-submitted stories for children which wholly embraced the nature-study movement. The nature-study movement was a conservation movement that advocated conservation as a divine obligation, that by educating children in education will enable them to see God through nature and teach the virtue of happiness in living alongside nature in harmony. There were stories that personified animals that may increase sympathy for them, and Carson grew up reading and writing stories like these.
Interest in Nature (Animals)
These stories and drawings reflect not only Rachel’s keen observation of bird and animal life… The stories she loved anthropomorphized animals so that they shared the same needs as humans for comfortable houses, domestic companionship, and good books.
As a child, Carson loved drawing and also began to write stories about animals. In these stories, animals are also anthromorphized. In one story, Carson’s love for animals is reflected not only in her writing but also in the ways she spent her solitary childhood. With no other small children near her home to play with, she was always “happiest with wild birds and creatures as companions”. This love for animals would be life long and would show again later in life in her writing and her choices in life, including those of her education and career.
Interest in Nature (Ocean)
Springdale residents who remember Rachel as a young girl tell the story, perhaps true, perhaps apocryphal, that her romance with the ocean began one day when she found a large fossilized shell in the rocky outcroppings on the family’s hillside property. It provoked questions that Rachel wanted answers to. She wondered where it had come from, what animal had made it and lived within it, where it had gone, and what happened to the sea that had nurtured it so long ago.
Carson loved animals but held a special interest for oceanic wildlife. It can be inferred that she had a special fondness for marine animals. This would show up in her career choices in choosing to pursue further studies and a career in marine biology rather than anything else. It would also show in her writing, specifically in her three-part series about the sea: Under the Sea-Wind, The Sea Around Us, and The Edge of The Sea.
Environmental Values
In the end, Rachel Carson remembered only how embarrassed she was by the foul smell of the glue factory that greeted disembarking passengers at the train station; how dreary and dirty the working-class town became when the West Penn Power Company and Duquesne Light Company squeezed it between their huge power stations at both ends, and how endlessly ugly Springdale was.
It can be inferred that having experienced and loved the natural environment, as a child Carson felt disdain for the human influence on the natural environment. This would show later especially in her final and most influential book, Silent Spring, where she pleaded mankind to consider the impact of their actions on the natural environment.