In the more than three decades that have gone by since Rachel Carson died from cancer on April 14, 1964, the American people have come to assume that environmental problems will yield to legislative or technological responses, if not right away then at some point in the future. Rivers set afire by chemical wastes will in time produce a Clean Water Act. Medically dangerous ozone levels will drive Congress to write a Clean Air Act and engineers to perfect the catalytic converter. Love Canal and associated toxic horrors will lead to Jimmy Carter's Superfund program. It is therefore useful, for all of us who live in this post-Earth Day era of regulatory micromanagement, to be reminded of an earlier age, when Congress was at best indifferent to the notion of environmental stewardship, when conservationists had trouble getting heard and when there was no meaningful outlet for their views besides the printed word -- television having yet to develop its present appetite for commentary.
For that reason alone a full-scale examination of Rachel Carson's career and extraordinary influence on American sensibilities has been long overdue. Here, after all, was an obscure, shy, largely self-taught and apolitical government bureaucrat who managed to produce two of the most influential books of the last half century. ''The Sea Around Us,'' a lyrical examination of the rhythms and creatures of the oceans published in 1950, disclosed a hitherto unnoticed and astonishingly broad appetite among ordinary Americans for more information about the natural world. ''Silent Spring,'' published in 1962, arguably did more than any other single publication to alert the world to the hazards of chemical poisoning. Both books appeared first in serial form in The New Yorker. Both became public events in a way that flabbergasted even the author. Both contributed mightily to the formation of the postwar environmental movement.
Linda Lear's ''Rachel Carson: Witness for Nature'' is the most exhaustive account so far of Carson's private, professional and public lives. What emerges, of course, is something more than a shy bureaucrat. Rachel Carson was a woman of clear purpose and prodigious energy who married two great gifts -- a restless scientific curiosity and a God-given talent for poetic writing -- to serve one purpose. That purpose was to make the natural world, in all its complexity and frailty, accessible.
Carson was raised in dirt-poor circumstances on a tiny Allegheny River farm near Pittsburgh. With scholarships arranged by her indomitable mother, she attended the elite Pennsylvania College for Women, where she agonized endlessly over whether to become a scientist or a writer until a single influential professor, a biologist named Mary Scott Skinker, convinced her that she could be both. Skinker went to Washington, and Carson followed. At Skinker's suggestion, she enrolled in Johns Hopkins, fully intending to take a Ph.D. in zoology. When the money ran out, she hooked up as a ''junior aquatic biologist'' with what was later to become the Interior Department's Fish and Wildlife Service.
During the Depression, Carson served as caretaker and breadwinner for her jobless parents (and, later, a sister and nephew). Slight in stature, tied by necessity to a desk, she was bedeviled by a string of minor ailments. Even so, she managed to turn out a steady stream of newspaper and magazine articles on the natural world, mainly for The Baltimore Sun and occasionally for The Atlantic Monthly, and even managed a book, ''Under the Sea Wind'' (1941), a study of the life-cycles of various sea creatures. Carson realized early on that the only way she could afford to leave government service and devote herself full time to her nature studies was to write her way out; not until ''The Sea Around Us'' was she able to do so.
Though she chafed against it, her job actually served her well as a more than adequate substitute for the academic credentials that poverty had denied her. Her colleagues in the Fish and Wildlife Service were first-rate naturalists and ardent conservationists; indeed, it was from them that she first learned of the dangers to birds and other wildlife posed by DDT -- the focus of ''Silent Spring.'' Equally important, the public relations aspect, which included writing a series of pamphlets on the national wildlife refuge system, gave her valuable field experience that an academic career might not have.
Though extraordinarily single-minded once she set herself a task, Carson was not a drudge. She never married (she once suggested, half in jest, that she had enough responsibilities already, which on the evidence was certainly true), but delighted in her frequent trips to Maine, Woods Hole and the Everglades, and found sustenance and pleasure in a series of warm friendships, largely with women like her early mentor, Mary Scott Skinker, and her New York-based literary agent, Marie Rodell. Carson was also a shrewd negotiator with reluctant or lazy publishers and not in the least bit bashful about lobbying for prestigious literary awards to bring her the money she needed to keep going.
Strictly as a narrative biography, Lear's book works perfectly well, but she could usefully have pushed the pause button once in a while. Relentlessly chronological and only occasionally analytical, she does not fully engage the intellectual debates that Carson inspired, thereby shortchanging not only Carson's spirited critics but also Carson herself. On an even more rudimentary level, Lear assumes far too much knowledge on the part of her reader about Carson's books, and nowhere bothers to summarize them in a systematic way -- surely not a lot to ask of a biography that plows ahead for over 600 pages.
A fuller summary of Carson's practical legacy would also have been appropriate. Carson's dismal scenario of a ''silent spring,'' when robins and other birds would not appear, did not in fact come to pass. But one powerful reason that her predictions were wrong was that her diagnosis was right. Society heeded her warning, enacted necessary reforms (like bans on bioaccumulative pesticides like DDT and chlordane) and prevented, or at least postponed, the day of reckoning. The denouement, in short, seems worthy of more attention than Lear gives it. But this is a book about a life, not about its consequences. And what an extraordinary life it was.