Rachel Carson and Virginia?

We imagine Rachel Carson along the rocky coast of Maine at her summer cottage, haunting the beaches of North Carolina, or working on Silent Spring at her suburban home in Silver Spring, Maryland.

But, as Rachel Carson Council (RCC) President & CEO, Bob Musil, told his lecture audience during an Earth Week visit to the University of Virginia (UVA), Carson knew and loved Virginia, visited often, wrote about it in some depth, and would have admired the array of environmental programs, projects, institutes, and engaged students and faculty at today’s University of Virginia.

Musil was invited to UVA by Paul Freedman, professor of politics, election analyst for ABC News, and director of the highly interdisciplinary and innovative major in Environment, Thought and Practice (ETP). Musil was also hosted by Manuel Lerdau, professor of environmental sciences and biology. Lerdau is also Research Director for UVA’s 3,000 acre tract of land known as Morven that is the university’s outdoor sustainability lab and where various faculty, students, and visiting scholars carry out research on sustainable agricultural practices, community gardening, land management and design.

Musil began his UVA visit on Earth Day at UVA’s Eco-Fair and Global Studies Symposium on the university’s historic “grounds” (campus) where he met and talked with students and faculty, including Phoebe Crisman, Director of Global Studies, about their environmental research, projects and engagement with the community. Throughout the day Musil encouraged a number of the environmental students he met to apply for RCC National Environment Leadership Fellowships, including those from a student-led campaign to stop the Dominion corporation from building 6 Gigawatts of natural gas facilities, starting with one in Chesterfield, VA.

The next day, Musil toured Morven and birded there with Manuel Lerdau who grew up in Silver Spring and, as a teen, worked on the files and manuscripts of Shirley Briggs. Briggs had been Rachel Carson’s close friend and colleague at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) and then became the first long-time head of the Rachel Carson Council (RCC). Lerdau also worked and birded in his youth with the legendary Chan Robbins, another friend of Rachel Carson’s, who wrote the best-selling Birds of North America and led the research on the harmful effects of DDT that Carson learned about from him.

Fresh from exploring Morven, Musil taught Lerdau’s class “The Ecology and Evolution of Birds,” where he told how he began birding while fruitlessly searching for moose in Canada. He and his wife, Caryn, watched “small brown birds” hopping around their campsite and flashing white stripes on their tails. After trudging to the park visitor center for an expensive hardback of The Birds Of Canada, they discovered they had seen Slate-colored Juncos (now Dark-eyed Juncos). From then on, they saw juncos, which had been invisible to them, all over the place. The same soon became true for other birds, flowers, trees, or mosses that had gone unobserved, unnamed, and hence did not exist. It is the fresh, careful observation, discovery, and wonder of things, Musil said, that is at the heart of Rachel Carson’s ethic and the work of the Rachel Carson Council.

In her small notebooks at the Beinecke Rare Book Library at Yale, Carson left preliminary notes on her observations, including one about a sanderling, the small, comically windup, sandpiper that rushes along and in and out of low surf to get tiny clams. Ultimately, Carson cast a pair of sanderlings as characters in her first book, Under the Sea-Wind. She traced their incredible migration to the Arctic and back to South America. As we follow along with Blackfoot and Silverbar, observing their nesting, their perilous escapes from an Arctic Fox, and more, we come to empathize with them and love them.

Rachel Carson also studied ecology, genetics, and evolution as a doctoral student at Johns Hopkins, Musil noted. She wrote in her ocean books about the birth of our planet, the moon, the sea, and the miraculous evolution of life on Earth. For Carson, each species, each person, had evolved over the eons into a special niche — whether a sanderling darting along the surf, or an Inuit mother nursing in the Arctic — and deserved our wonder, care, and concern. As Rachel Carson put it:

“One way to open your eyes to unnoticed beauty is to ask yourself, “What if I had never seen this before? What if I knew I would never see it again?”

Paul Freedman’s class, “Introduction to Environmental Thought and Practice,” was next for Musil where he explained that Rachel Carson was best known for combining rigorous science with imagination, awe and empathy. But, like Professor Freedman, she was deeply engaged in politics and should not be seen as a lone environmental saint who changed the world simply by writing a book. Instead, environmental students should not shy away from politics and action, especially in these dark days of executive attacks on all that Rachel Carson had stood and fought for. Musil then recounted how the Rachel Carson Council has fought for academic freedom and free speech on campus, against Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s moves to attack science, federal workers, environmental policies, and environmental non-profits, while demonstrating at Treasury, NIH, and the massive “Hands Off” rally in Washington, DC. Musil added that the RCC had also just brought over 100 RCC advocates, experts, leaders of environmental justice communities, and international supporters to Washington, DC for RCC Advocacy Days and the RCC National Wood Pellet Forum.

Over the course of three days, they pressed for environmental justice and to an end to the wood pellet industry that is clear-cutting American forests, turning them into wood pellets at industrial scale in factories in the South — as in an Enviva plant in Southampton, Virginia, that produces over 600,000 metric tons of pellets and is opposed by Rep. Don Beyer (D-VA-8) These remains of American forests are then shipped overseas to be burned for energy in Europe and the UK. Throughout its campaigns, the RCC has worked and engaged with allies and leaders on Capitol Hill and in resistance to the Trump Administration such as Senators Cory Booker, Sheldon Whitehouse, Chris Van Hollen, and others, as well as leaders in the House of Representatives like Rep. Jamie Raskin.

Dr. Musil concluded his time at the University of Virginia with a passionate public lecture on “Rachel Carson’s Legacy: Empathy, Politics and the Environment.” Carson grew up poor on a small farm outside of Pittsburgh, but was introduced to nature, writing, a love of learning, and concern for others by her mother, the brilliant daughter of a learned Presbyterian minister. Carson won national writing awards as a child and at Chatham College where she was steeped in Romantic writers and poets. Then, she discovered “something to write about” in the study of marine biology and the sea. Unable to finish her Ph.D. in biology at Johns Hopkins during the Depression because of financial needs, caring for her extended family, working half-time, and teaching two sections of biology at separate campuses, Rachel Carson was forced to end her doctoral studies. She took a job with the Bureau of Fisheries in Washington, D.C. (later the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service or USFWS) and began to write about the ocean, including a deeply researched series of booklets on the new chain of federally-funded National Wildlife Refuges such as the one at Chincoteague in Virginia.

Rachel Carson continued to take work assignments along with birding and field trips that led her to Cobb Island in the Virginia Outer Banks, and then from there along the entire East Coast, collecting specimens with her friend Bob Hines, a USFWS illustrator. Hines later illustrated Carson’s best-selling ocean books, The Sea Around Us and The Edge of the Sea.

As a result, Musil explained, Carson was a lifelong, proud, and active Democrat who went to events with Eleanor Roosevelt and Jackie Kennedy, campaigned for Adlai Stevenson and John F. Kennedy, and publicly challenged the Eisenhower Administration’s dismissal of the conservationist head of the USFWS that began the destruction of the environmental legacy of Teddy Roosevelt and FDR. Carson refused to cower or bow to her critics in the Congress and at corporations, or to the white-coated, paid scientific hacks who assailed her professionally and personally.

The Rachel Carson Council carries on that spirit of resistance today and much of its work and energy comes from the new generation of environmental leaders on campuses. Or, as Musil put it gesturing toward the students in his audience, “You are the leaders we have been waiting for! Join with us in the RCC and literally thousands of students nationwide, apply for our RCC National Environmental Leadership Fellowships, come to our Advocacy Days, and, most of all, keep on doing the essential environmental work that you are already doing. Never, never stop. As Rachel Carson said:

“Conservation is a cause that has no end. There is no point at which we will say our work is finished.”

At the conclusion of Dr. Bob Musil’s visit to the University of Virginia, some 100 students and faculty joined the RCC Campus Network, perhaps a dozen undergraduate and master’s students sought advice about applying for RCC fellowships, and UVA became the 82^nd college or university to join the Rachel Carson Council.