The picture window overlooking the Sheepscot River and Bay in Maine is just as I remembered it. So too the knotty pine paneled walls, the comfortable rattan furniture, and the braided wool rug in the large living room filled with books, seashells, and reading lamps. The familiar rocky shore below the cottage is exposed by the ebbing river, as the waters of the Sheepscot flow back into the Atlantic. Hours later, they will return to nourish coastal tide pools—the eternal rhythm that sparked all life on Earth. Red spruce trees tower over the cottage’s white-railed deck where, for a week, we will read, relax, and watch the sun set over coastal Maine.
We have returned to the most peaceful place I have ever known: a simple retreat built in the 1950s by Rachel Carson. A courageous scientist and writer who exposed the dangers of pesticides, such as DDT, she helped give birth to the global environmental movement with her seminal book, Silent Spring (1962). Eight years after the book was published, the U.S. EPA was created and science-based environmental laws passed Congress with bipartisan support. DDT was ultimately banned.
Less well known are Carson’s books about the sea, including her internationally popular The Sea Around Us, the royalties from which made it possible for her to create her seaside sanctuary. Owned by her family since her premature death in 1964, the property has been kept in its original condition. Carson’s lyrical writing inspired her readers to seek wonder and awe in nature: to understand that in nature nothing exists alone.
Rising Seas, Warmer Oceans
A marine biologist, writer, and conservationist, Carson spent a decade working for the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, where she meticulously reviewed and wrote about groundbreaking scientific studies being conducted on the world’s oceans, ecosystems, and species. Her ability to synthesize and connect the findings for a lay audience in the post-World War II years was remarkable. Even more extraordinary was Carson’s ability to detect environmental changes across diverse geographies; her warnings were eerily prescient.
Seventy-five years ago, Carson wrote: “We live in an age of rising seas. Now in our own lifetime we are witnessing a startling alteration of climate.” She knew that oceanographers in the 1940s had discovered significant changes in the temperature and distribution of North Atlantic currents, including the Gulf Stream. “The frigid top of the world is very clearly warming up,” she wrote. Carson hoped to write a book about these issues, but cancer kept her from using her exceptional communication skills and scientific knowledge to alert the world.
Last winter, the Maine coast was hammered with high water, waves, and wind. Carson’s family wrote me: “We thought that the height of the ledge at Rachel’s place would have put the land out of reach of the tempestuous seas, but not so. Waves reached up and scoured the shoreline in some spots where the spruce, bay and huckleberry take hold. Large pieces of ledge were undermined.”
As I sat on the deck, reading a book I’d brought with me (Rising: Dispatches from the New American Shore), I wondered how close the water might eventually get to the top of the granite ledge on which Carson built her cottage. The nearby Gulf of Maine is warming 97% faster than the rest of the world’s oceans, making the state’s coastline particularly vulnerable.
While she would have been devastated by the loss of habitats and species over the past sixty years and alarmed by the accelerating trajectory of the climate crisis, I don’t believe Carson would have been surprised. She knew that humans had embarked on a path of unchecked growth and industrial development that would, if not abated, disrupt the balance of the natural world. Enduring extreme pain from cancer and other maladies, Carson forced herself, in her final years, to finish Silent Spring and defend its data-driven warnings from aggressive attacks by the chemical and agricultural industries.
A Profound Threat
Sixty years after Carson’s death, efforts by current leaders of the Republican Party to silence scientists, such as herself, have gained enormous momentum. Last year, the conservative think-tank Heritage Foundation published Project 2025: a 900-page blueprint for the next conservative President, i.e. Donald Trump, should he be elected in November.
Project 2025 will reshape the federal government and consolidate power in the office of the president. The heart of the plan calls for political appointees loyal to the president to replace career civil service personnel: the scientists and technical experts hired to inform decision-makers. Legal experts say the sweeping policy guide will undermine the rule of law, separation of powers, separation of church and state, and civil liberties.
If fully implemented, the plan will sabotage climate science programs, investments, and actions that are focused on protecting communities from sea level rise, extreme heat, unprecedented flooding, raging wildfires, and expanding diseases. Time is of the essence to expediate climate solutions, not to ignore this existential threat that is already affecting life on Earth.
Project 2025 calls for the dismantling of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which includes the National Weather Service. Without this agency monitoring our climate and weather, and informing the many parts of our government that need that data, we run the risk of being unprepared for the next hurricane, storm, flood, or drought. It also takes aim at the U.S. EPA—eliminating or substantially weakening research, regulatory, and enforcement programs that safeguard our communities from toxins and other pollutants.
As I walked along Rachel Carson’s beloved shoreline, I kept hearing her voice: “The more clearly we can focus our attention on the wonders and realities of the universe about us, the less taste we shall have for destruction.”
