Comments by Moderator Linda Lear

Rachel Carson’s first twenty years of life were spent along the shores of an increasingly polluted Allegheny River. It was a river flowing from pristine fishing grounds above Springdale through railway dumps, electrical powerhouses, along slaughterhouses and chemical treatment plants for the glass, aluminum, coke and steel industries of Pittsburgh into the Ohio River at Pittsburgh’s three rivers point. Her growing up coincided with the climax of the second industrial revolution --at the very place where its awesome power to affect the future of human life and welfare was the most uncritically accepted. "We bring new things to light."

I come from the same earth, and I have always wondered what its influence was on me. As I came to write Rachel’s story I thought long and hard about what did this contamination of the environment mean to her early consciousness. Would she have been as quick to pick upon synthetic chemicals had she come from somewhere else?

Now that Witness for Nature is finished, that question in my own mind is still not definitively answered. How does one’s first consciousness of nature abide, and what difference did it make in Carson’s ability to observe and to see the "contamination of nature," and to try to "do something about it?"

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