THEMATIC FRAMEWORK
RACHEL CARSON HOMESTEAD ASSOCIATION
May 25, 2011
Shomer Zwelling & Associates
THEMATIC FRAMEWORK OUTLINE
• OVERARCHING THEME—Rachel Carson: Her Roots, Our Heritage
• PRIMARY THEME # 1 –A Sense of Wonder
• PRIMARY THEME # 2—A World of Relationships
• PRIMARY THEME #3—Challenges, Choices, Courage and Commitment
OVERVIEW
Rachel Carson had a profound impact on society and culture during the second half of the twentieth century. Her influence continues to reverberate throughout the world. In light of widespread changes in attitude, behavior and policy that she helped initiate, it is astounding that Rachel Carson’s name is unfamiliar to many people today.
As the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Silent Spring approaches, the Rachel Carson Homestead Association is in a unique position to redress this situation. From what more apt place could Rachel Carson, her message and her vision be reintroduced to the public than the modest house in Springdale, Pennsylvania, the home where she lived as a child, grew into adulthood, and first fell in love with the wonders and mysteries of nature!
The timing is especially propitious—and the opportunity at hand—for the Homestead Association to engage and educate another generation of children and adults. Because the Homestead itself is in a transitional period, this is actually an ideal time for the Association to hone its core messages and develop innovative interpretive programs to communicate compelling information about Rachel Carson, her legacy, the environment and responsible social action.
In a similar vein, the interpretive planning process—with its strengths and emphases on effective communications and public program development—offers an ideal vehicle with which to begin this enterprise. The Homestead’s staff, Board, stakeholders and an array of experts, working in concert as an interpretive planning team, can serve as agents of change by formulating new ways to tell Rachel Carson’s story while also making her values, commitments and worldview accessible and meaningful to a wider audience.
Although this interpretive planning document is only a single step in a larger endeavor, it’s nevertheless an important one. In that spirit, this report—rooted in a series of interviews, an interactive workshop, focused research, the Association’s mission, the unique qualities of the site, a review of in-house documents as well as the Homestead’s past public offerings—identifies an Overarching Interpretive Theme and three Primary Interpretive Themes. These core ideas—distilled into a few succinct, evocative words—can serve to infuse and shape subsequent interpretive planning and public program development.
A note about this report’s format: although the three Primary Themes are numbered, they are not hierarchically ordered. Each Primary Theme is of equal significance and weight. Each offers distinct programmatic possibilities, but together they work in tandem to form a whole. In other words, the individual parts and the whole are deeply interrelated and interdependent. In this sense as well as many others, Rachel Carson—her life, words, ideas, actions and outlook—provides the guiding spirit for this thematic framework.
Finally, a word about fleshing out this thematic framework: along with each theme title, this report also includes elaborations and amplifications. The reflections and implications included with each theme title are intended to suggest possibilities and potentiality. They are not in any way exhaustive. Indeed, the themes were crafted, in part, to foster creativity, to encourage additional avenues of expression and exploration rather than to narrowly limit, restrain or hamper them.
OVERARCHING THEME
RACHEL CARSON: HER ROOTS, OUR HERITAGE
This Overarching Theme makes evident from the very start that Rachel Carson’s early years in her Springdale home—the place where her character and worldview initially took shape—have ramifications for us today. Whether her ideas, attitudes and values are embraced or opposed, we are her beneficiaries and her successors. What we do with this rich inheritance is for us, her figurative heirs, to decide.
The Overarching Theme also includes a strong but subtle moral imperative for this generation and subsequent ones too: the roots uncovered and explored at the Homestead are hers, but the responsibility for carrying on the work belongs to us and our children. This principled perspective on history and citizenship is very much in keeping with Rachel Carson’s profoundly moral outlook on human behavior, social responsibility and accountability.
The importance of place is also a feature of the Overarching Theme, and place is yet another significant component in Rachel Carson’s life story. In addition to the woods in Springdale and the banks of the Allegheny River in that hometown, the coastlines of Maine, North Carolina and Massachusetts as well as the Florida Keys were all significant places of discovery for her. Family and nature provided Rachel Carson with a firm sense of rootedness, a place from which to grow.
When Rachel Carson was born in western Pennsylvania in 1907, Springdale was a rural community and the small four-room structure on Marion Avenue included 65 acres of woods and bramble. From her home the Allegheny River was visible and accessible. It was in this relatively rustic setting that Rachel Carson first encountered nature during walks with her mother. Here she began to muse about the sea, partake in the mysteries of nature, write stories, wonder.
Over the nineteen years that she lived in Springdale, Rachel Carson witnessed substantial changes in her birthplace as industry emerged both along the river and in the town. Although the new manufacturing order brought much-needed jobs to economically strapped community residents, her father included, it also brought environmental blight and degradation to the area. Indeed, this change with its attendant losses might well have contributed to her resolve in adulthood to protect the natural world from the ravages of greed and unbound acquisitiveness.
The Overarching Theme provides a way for Homestead programs to explore Rachel Carson’s origins as well as her impact on her era and on ours too. By building public programs rooted in the Overarching Theme, the Association will convey to visitors the ways in which Rachel Carson became Rachel Carson—the influences, personal and familial, as well as the social, cultural and physical context out of which she emerged. In turn, this theme sets the stage for describing the ways in which Rachel Carson transformed her world and influences ours.
Finally, the Overarching Theme incorporates the Primary Themes—Rachel Carson’s sense of wonder, her emphasis on the importance of relationships in all aspects of life, her dedication to action rooted in intelligence and social responsibility—while also taking these core ideas in a common direction. Each of the Primary Themes is contained within the Overarching Theme. The sum and the parts are profoundly interrelated, of a piece.
PRIMARY THEME # 1
A SENSE OF WONDER
Well before Women’s Home Companion magazine published her article, “Help Your Child to Wonder” in July 1956, Rachel Carson employed lyrical, imaginative and even spiritual language when writing about the world of nature for popular publications. In a 1937 Atlantic Monthly article entitled “Undersea”, for example, she included picturesque and inspired phrases such as “material immortality”, “cosmic background”, “a panorama of endless change”, “a bewildering variety of living creatures” and “boundless pastures”.
As a child in Springdale, Rachel Carson took walks in the woods with her mother, leisurely explored the nearby Allegheny River with family members, and read books about distant seas while quietly alone in her room. Long before she came to realize that the natural world was threatened by human avarice and arrogance, Rachel Carson was enamored with the beauty, glory and mystery of creation.
In our own day, the sense of wonder that Rachel Carson consciously experienced, cultivated and encouraged during her lifetime can be seen on the faces of children from four to twelve years old who attend the Homestead’s “Bug Camp” during the summertime. By making “a sense of wonder” one of its Primary Interpretive Themes and interpretive goals, the Homestead will formally and deliberately commit itself to a service that it already performs but on an even larger scale.
With this theme as one of the cornerstones for future public program development, visitors who come to the Homestead will themselves actually experience a sense of wonder and mystery, not simply read or be told about it. Like Rachel Carson when she lived in Springdale or walked along the beach in Maine, Homestead guests will learn from their own first-hand encounters, discoveries and explorations of nature.
Rachel Carson, of course, made this very same point in her own writings but much better than any planning document possibly could. Her words best capture this theme, while also providing the challenge and the charge for future interpretive public programs at the Homestead:
A child’s world is fresh and new and beautiful, full of wonder and excitement . . . If I had any influence with the good fairy who is supposed to preside over the christening of all children I should ask that her gift to each child in the world be a sense of wonder so indestructible that it would last throughout life . . .
If a child is to keep alive his inborn sense of wonder without any such gift from the fairies, he needs the companionship of at least one adult who can share it, rediscovering with him the joy, excitement and mystery of the world we live in.
–Rachel Carson, The Sense of Wonder, 1956/1965
PRIMARY THEME # 2
A WORLD OF RELATIONSHIPS
Rachel Carson was a pioneer and an innovator, a creative person who fostered new ways of seeing the world, but she was not by any stretch of the imagination a loner or a person apart. Indeed, Rachel Carson lived her entire life in a intricate web of relationships—personal and professional—and in her popular and technical writings she consistently emphasized her conviction that nature is best understood and appreciated when seen in light of a vast array of intersecting and interdependent networks.
Beginning with a powerful, virtually life-long connection to her mother—the person who introduced young Rachel to the worlds of nature and music—from infancy until death Rachel Carson was embedded in a rich fabric of human relatedness: with family members, friends, teachers, classmates, mentors, supervisors, assistants, colleagues and collaborators.
As the Editor-in-Chief of publications for the United States Fish and Wildlife Service, she was exacting and insisted on high quality work products from subordinates. In a similar vein she was steadfastly devoted to family members and friends, conscientiously and wholeheartedly meeting a wide range of responsibilities, commitments and challenges. Long before it was commonplace for women to be a family breadwinner, Rachel Carson provided for various household members in a host of ways, and when her nephew was orphaned she adopted him.
As a scientist and writer, Rachel Carson repeatedly underscored the diverse ways in which all components of the natural world were in dynamic relationship, one to another. In an era when systems thinking, complexity theory, linkages and interlocking networks were not yet mainstream concepts, Rachel Carson’s articles, books and speeches called attention to the complex web of relations in which all of creation was a part.
The challenge for humanity, she frequently maintained in her later years, is not to dominate the natural world or to invent new technologies with which to extract wealth from it, but rather to find skills and capacities to live in harmony with it, to protect nature and ourselves from human greed and arrogance, to cherish the mystery and the hard-won but increasingly precarious balance that is an inextricable component of the natural world:
We still have not become mature enough to see ourselves as a very tiny part of a vast and incredible universe, a universe that is distinguished above all else by a mysterious and wonderful unity that we flout at out own peril . . .
Instead of always trying to impose our will on Nature we should sometimes be quiet and listen to what she has to tell us . . .
[M]ankind is challenged, as it has never been challenged before, to prove its maturity and its mastery—not of nature, but of itself. Therein lies our hope and our destiny.
–Rachel Carson, “Of Man and the Stream of Time”, 1962
For Carson, relationship was a defining characteristic of all life, the entire natural world.
PRIMARY THEME # 3
CHALLENGES, CHOICES, COURAGE AND COMMITMENT
Like most Americans during the first half of the twentieth century, Rachel Carson had an abiding faith in science and progress, but when World War II ended in nuclear inferno, questions about human judgment started to trouble her. Only a few weeks earlier, in July 1945, Carson had already written the editors of Readers Digest about yet another problem, seemingly unrelated, that was beginning to appear on her ever keen and sensitive radar screen; biologists at the Patuxent Research Center in Maryland were increasingly concerned that DDT—considered by many a miracle pesticide—might “upset the delicate balance of nature if used unwisely.” With the dawning of the “space age” in October 1957, when the Soviet Union launched the world’s first artificial satellite, Carson’s doubts and reservations about human discernment and farsightedness amplified.
Questions and issues that Rachel Carson raised during the post-World War II years were of a piece: was humankind psychologically prepared to assume a new role in the universe? were we exhibiting sufficient humility? were we perhaps too arrogant? was our moral development keeping apace with our burgeoning scientific knowledge? Carson came to fear that our intrepid scientific and technological conquests might result in unintended but irreparable harm to ourselves and the planet. In the aftermath of World War II, Carson worried that our maturity—or perhaps more precisely, our lack of maturity—was at the heart of the matter.
In the late 1950s, Carson immersed herself in researching and writing about these disturbing questions, especially as they related to the widespread use of synthetic chemicals in the environment, and in 1962 her efforts culminated in the publication of Silent Spring. In the book she drew on scientific evidence from a variety of respected sources to paint a dark vision of the future while simultaneously issuing a passionate call for modifications in attitude, behavior and public policy regarding indiscriminate spraying of pesticides:
We stand now where two roads diverge . . . The road we have long been traveling is deceptively easy, a smooth superhighway on which we progress with great speed, but at its end lies disaster. The other fork of the road—the one “less traveled”—offers our last, our only chance to reach a destination that assures the preservation of our earth.
Rachel Carson, Silent Spring, 1962
Although Carson never for a moment believed that a single book would change the trajectory of history, she felt “bound by a solemn obligation” to do what she could to protect the natural world, a realm that she first learned to love and cherish as a young child in Springdale, Pennsylvania. In writing Silent Spring and in advocating informed action, Carson brought to bear the values and talents she had initially discovered as a child on Marion Avenue and that she had subsequently cultivated throughout her adult life.
In this regard and others too, Rachel Carson can be presented as a model citizen for Homestead visitors—children and adults alike—to study and emulate. While our context and quandaries are different from those that Carson confronted, her willingness to “acknowledge what I couldn’t help seeing,” her courage to make difficult choices and her commitment to lifelong principles provide a lens through which visitors can look to explore and comprehend responsible citizenship, the role of values in public life, and the challenges and the benefits of social action. In this same spirit, it would be well to disclose to visitors that Carson’s willingness to stand up and be counted—to rock the boat by questioning conventional wisdom and powerful economic interests—was often a hardship and took a considerable toll on her.
IMPLICATIONS FOR PLANNING AND PUBLIC PROGRAMS
While developing this Thematic Framework—doing research, reviewing documents, interviewing stakeholders and content experts—several related interpretive issues came to light. The bullet points below summarize key topics and include recommendations, all of which will require additional discussion and planning.
• The yard, both front and back, provides an exceptional interpretive opportunity. Because the Carson family owned 65 acres at the time when Rachel was born in 1907, it makes virtually no sense to try to “restore” the property to the way it looked then. Even if it were possible to do, visitors would almost certainly not see the current home site with Rachel’s lively and fertile imagination. Nevertheless, with creative landscape planning and artful design the present property can be turned into an oasis of enchantment, beauty and mystery. Here visitors could experience a “sense of wonder” and also get a taste for the natural web of relationships that were central to Rachel Carson’s worldview. A thoughtfully planted and well cared for plot of land could achieve interpretive ends even if it appears substantially different from the way it was at the beginning of the twentieth century when the Carson family lived here.
• While it’s virtually impossible to restore the landscape to its previous appearance, structural restoration of the house to the way it appeared externally—to its footprint—at the time when the Carson family live on Marion Avenue would have considerable interpretive merit and would also have a powerful impact on visitors. Of course, fresh paint, modern windows, green insulation and hvac systems as well as a host of repairs to the façade would give the structure a museum quality look, but visitors to historic sites generally make allowances for these amenities and, as a rule, they are able to suspend disbelief in this regard. Structural restoration and upkeep improvements to the facade for interpretive ends would help activate the historical imaginations of visitors and set the stage for powerful experiences.
• As for the interior of the house, a neutral box would serve interpretive ends. It will give the Homestead Association considerable freedom and capacity to develop high quality, state-of-the-art museum exhibitions inside the home. While individual rooms would be the size and shape that they were in 1907, modern-day methods of presentation will better serve the thematic framework presented in this document than period rooms, all the more so because we do not know—and probably never will know—the ways in which the house was furnished by the Carson family.
• Marion Avenue and Springdale look considerably different today than they did in 1907, when Rachel Carson was born. This fact presents the Homestead with a major interpretive challenge. While docents and written words on signage can provide detailed information about the property and the community at the beginning of the twentieth century, as a rule neither print or oral statements can compete with visual impressions. Consequently, in their mind’s eye, visitors will imagine the Springdale of Rachel Carson’s youth in light of the Springdale they see on the day of their visit. How to counter this impression? Or perhaps more accurately, how to counter this misimpression? A sizeable, detailed model or diorama of the Carson property in 1907 along with large photographs of the town from the early years of the twentieth century and/or a substantial mural of the town, the river and the family’s property as they appeared a century ago will help offset the mistaken visual impression that visitors will otherwise (unconsciously) carry with them as they walk through the Homestead. If this part of the exhibit program were located at or near the beginning of the overall visitor experience, it would be especially effective. In addition, it would also be instructive for this introductory presentation to take account of the emergence of large-scale industry–with its attendant environmental consequences—in Springdale during the nineteen years that young Rachel Carson lived there. In this way visitors will discover that Rachel Carson’s adult concerns originated, to a degree, in some of the changes she witnessed growing up in her hometown.
• Several persons who have given guided tours of the Homestead over the years emphatically claim that looking out the upstairs front window over the treetops and toward the river is a powerful interpretive moment for themselves and for visitors too. They contend that this experience—in which visitors spontaneously imagine themselves standing in the shoes of Rachel Carson—needs to be “preserved” whatever other changes are made inside the house. Similarly, some interviewees also spoke fondly of the stairway from the first floor to the second. Here again, the underlying message was that it is important to give visitors some sense or “feel” for the home during the era when Rachel Carson lived there. Planners and designers are advised to keep this valuable piece of information in mind as new exhibitions are conceived and implemented.
• Several interviewees suggested that the Homestead develop web-based educational curriculum materials for use in schools. Such materials could be an effective means of outreach, especially during this transitional period, and would need to be aligned with Pennsylvania’s Department of Education Standards. Outreach educational units developed by the Homestead would be a natural fit for several content areas within the Department’s Curriculum Framework, specifically Environment and Ecology, History, Civics and Government.
• For this project, the interview process itself was not only informative, it was also inspiring. Many of the people interviewed have important stories to tell: about the early years of the Homestead, about the environmental movement, about Rachel Carson and her associates. It would behoove the Association to initiate an oral history project as a way of securing and preserving these valuable stories and the voices of these inspiring people.
• At the interpretive workshop conducted in February 2011, several participants indicated that they hoped the Homestead would be a place for intelligent dialogue as well as robust advocacy. Many environmental problems are complicated and knotty, calling for in-depth exploration and communication. In her day, Rachel Carson valued research, investigation, collaboration and discernment before making pubic policy decisions. In this spirit, interpretive workshop participants proposed that the Homestead sponsor educational debates and illuminating discussions in which diverse, informed and responsible opinions be aired with regard to controversial and thorny environmental subjects. Such programs would provide opportunities for frank and constructive exchanges while also cultivating sturdy and effectual citizenship skills. Such undertakings would require careful planning, pilot programming and guidance from professionals skilled in dealing with conflict and controversy.
• Next year will be the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Silent Spring. This occasion presents the Homestead Association with an unusual opportunity to inform the public about its existence, its mission, its place in the larger Rachel Carson story, and its commitment to her values, principles and environmental ethic.
SELECTED SOURCES CONSULTED
Carson, R. (1941). Under the Sea-Wind, New York. NY: Simon & Schuster.
Carson, R. (1951). The Sea Around Us. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
Carson, R. (1955). The Edge of the Sea. New York, NY: Houghton Mifflin.
Carson, R. (1962). Silent Spring. New York, NY: Houghton Mifflin.
Carson, R. (1962). “Of Man and the Stream of Time”. Claremont, CA: Scripps College.
Freeman, M., editor. (1995). Always, Rachel. Boston, MA: Beacon Press.
Lear, L., editor. (1998). Lost Woods. Boston, MA: Beacon Press.
Lear, L. (1997,2009). Rachel Carson: Witness for Nature. Boston, MA: Houghton, Mifflin, Harcourt.
Lytle, M.H. (2007). The Gentle Subversive. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
Matthiessen, P., editor. (2007). Courage for the Earth. New York: NY: Houghton Mifflin.
INTERVIEWEES AND WORKSHOP PARTICIPANTS
Danelle Ardell Linda Lear
Elisa Beck Bernie Lynch
Joy Braunstein Rob Pfaffmann
David Carlisle Themla Redick
Josh Clyde Vivian Schaffer
Patty DeMarco Bill Schillinger
Bryon Falchetti Deb Sigmund
Christine Ferguson Jeff Slack
Fiona Fisher Iris Strickland
Evie George Ruth Weir
Nancy Gift Kathleen Wendell
Tim Hayes
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Special thanks to Joy Braunstein, Danelle Ardell, Rob Pfaffmann and Iris Strickland for their inordinate skillfulness in organizing and seeing this project through to completion. Similarly, much gratitude to Linda Lear who generously shared her