A Green and fiery advocate

Allen Lane, #25

RACHEL Carson's book Silent Spring has been a landmark for the environmental movement since its publication 36 years ago. Her thesis (that the indiscriminate use of pesticides was a time-bomb which would cause untold damage to wildlife far beyond the immediate target, and likely even to threaten the health of humans) came as a shock to the public. Without her impassioned advocacy, couched in clear, prose-free of jargon, it's doubtful whether the message would have been so swiftly and readily learned. It's much to her credit that the

highly-toxic and persistent DDT, once hailed as a panacea, is now banned in most countries.

Silent Spring, rather to her surprise considering its scientific basis, was a best-seller, as was an earlier book, The Sea Around Us, where she described in limpid and often lyrical language the story of the sea and its countless denizens. They're still popular and still in print. But Carson herself shunned publicity and defended her privacy.

Linda Lear's exhaustive biography brings the life of this shy and reserved woman into clear focus. Lear draws on many sources. She has had access to personal letters and has, over the years, conducted numerous interviews, so that a completely rounded picture emerges. Sometimes the detail can seem excessive - how useful is it to learn that a manuscript was typed by her mother ''neatly in the small elite typeface of her old, black, Smith Corona typewriter''? But this is a small price to pay for such a carefully-researched and caringly-written work.

Carson didn't have it easy. Her family background in industrial Pennsylvania was modest, and when she chose science rather than literature as a career (she had early shown great talent for imaginative writing), she entered a profession which in the depression years in America was male-oriented and slanted against women. This was not unusual of course; a feminist consciousness, though not obtrusive, is an undercurrent in Lear's analysis. Strangely for someone who didn't see the ocean until she was grown up, the sea became a lifelong passion. She spent her first working years as a marine biologist for a government agency, the first three of her four books took the sea as their subject, and latterly her summers were spent in a cottage in Maine framed on one side by the forest and on the other by a rocky shoreline where she spent happy hours ''tide-pooling''.

Her neighbours in Maine were a married couple who became close friends. Indeed, the relationship between Rachel and Dorothy, the wife, swiftly developed into a deep love, remarkable in a woman as reticent as Carson (though Lear avoids any suggestion of lesbianism). It was Dorothy who scattered Carson's ashes on the brink of the sea when she died of cancer in 1964 at the age of 56, 19 months after the publication of Silent Spring.

Some of the most illuminating passages in Lear's book refer to the hostility with which the agri-chemical industries and other vested interests reacted to her conclusions in Silent Spring and the campaign they mounted to denigrate the book and its author. This is familiar ground today whenever commercial practices are subjected to environmental criticism.

Richard North, a former environment writer now ensconced in the other camp, recently dismissed Carson as someone who merely alerted the public to what government scientists already had in hand. That complacent attitude is all too familiar after the event. Carson, who loved bird-song, sea creatures, and the study of all life forms, is a true heroine of the green enlightenment.