Rachel Carson’s Quiet and Powerful Leadership

ANNOUNCER: HBR On Leadership.

HANNAH BATES: Welcome to HBR on Leadership, case studies and conversations with the world’s top business and management experts, hand-selected to help you unlock the best in those around you. Today, we bring you a conversation with Harvard Business School historian Nancy Koehn about the life, legacy, and often overlooked leadership of environmental trailblazer, Rachel Carson. In this episode, a shy woman armed with little more than a pen takes on some of the most powerful industrial companies and changes the world. Carson’s story has lessons for any leader facing an overwhelming challenge. You’ll learn how to strengthen your resilience, how to gather your energy and skills, and why caretaking is an act of leadership. This episode originally aired on HBR IdeaCast in March 2020. Here it is.

ADI IGNATIUS: Welcome to the HBR IdeaCast from Harvard Business Review. I’m Adi Ignatius. This is “Real Leaders,” a special series that examines the lives of some of the world’s most compelling and effective leaders, past and present, and offers lessons to all of us today. In our first episode, we told the story of a polar explorer. Today, an environmentalist.

RACHEL CARSON: We’ve heard the benefits of pesticides. We’ve heard a great deal about their safety. But very little about the hazards. Very little about the failure, the inefficiencies. And yet the public was being asked to accept these chemicals, was being asked to acquiesce in their use and did not have the whole picture. So, I set about to remedy the balance there.

ADI IGNATIUS: That’s Rachel Carson, speaking in a 1963 interview with CBS. Her book, Silent Spring has just been published and reveals the deep environmental damage from the widespread use of synthetic pesticides, like DDT. The reaction from chemical companies is swift and forceful.

ROBERT WHITE-STEVENS: The major claims in Miss Rachel Carson’s book, Silent Spring, are gross distortions of the actual facts.

ADI IGNATIUS: That’s a spokesperson for the chemical industry, Dr. Robert White-Stevens, also speaking with CBS back in 1963.

ROBERT WHITE-STEVENS: — in the field. If man were to faithfully follow the teachings of Miss Carson, we would return to the Dark Ages and the insects and diseases and vermin would once again inherit the Earth.

ADI IGNATIUS: But the book also gets attention from people who do take Carson’s research seriously. Like President John F. Kennedy.

JOHN KENNEDY: — particularly, of course, since Miss Carson’s book, they are examining the matter.

ADI IGNATIUS: In today’s episode, a woman of modest means, armed with little more than a pen, takes on some of the most powerful industrial companies and changes the world.

ADI IGNATIUS: I’m Adi Ignatius, Editor in Chief of Harvard Business Review and I’m here with Nancy Koehn, a great historian at Harvard Business School who has researched Carson’s exceptional life. Hi, Nancy.

NANCY KOEHN: Hey there.

ADI IGNATIUS: Her journey in some ways seems very unlikely. Rachel Carson grew up outside of Pittsburg in a small town. She was a good student. She started writing for a kid’s literary magazine at the young age, but the family didn’t have a lot of money.

NANCY KOEHN: She was awarded a scholarship when she graduated. She was Valedictorian of the small public high school she went to, and she was awarded a scholarship to go to what was then called, Pennsylvania College for Women. It’s now a fine, private school called Chatham College in Pittsburgh. So she’s on scholarship. Her mother has to sell the china, the family dishes, to help her get spending money. They borrow a car to drive her there, her father and her mother. And she is there, a poor kid from the outskirts of Pittsburgh. And so the story of her college years is about establishing herself really as a star student, particularly [in] English classes, but then by her sophomore year, at a subject she discovered she’s fascinated by, didn’t expect to be so, biology.

ADI IGNATIUS: So her story really throughout her life, it feels like the story of overcoming one challenge after another. She faced particularly tough challenges I think as a woman, particularly entering in the field of science.

NANCY KOEHN: Right. A woman who wants to make her way, in terms of an income, needs to be a teacher or she needs to be a nurse. She certainly can’t be a scientist. I mean it was highly unusual for women to graduate from college in 1925. It was even more unusual for a woman at that time to want to pursue graduate work. It was even more unusual for a woman to want to do that graduate work in the sciences. And she encounters almost nothing but naysayers, even though she’s accepted to Johns Hopkins with a scholarship to study zoology in her senior year.

ADI IGNATIUS: So Caron did go onto study at Johns Hopkins. She moved to Baltimore. But this is the onset of the Great Depression. Her family’s struggling financially back home. So she brings them to Baltimore to live with her. She starts working in the lab to earn extra money to support them, but eventually she drops out of the PhD program. So how does she deal with that setback?

NANCY KOEHN: When she drops out, she gets her Master’s in 1932 and then drops out of the graduate program because she can’t hold down the job she needs to support her birth family — mom, dad, sister, two daughters of sister, and brother. There are days when there’s so little food in the house that they’re eating apples for supper. I mean this is really hard. She can’t make enough money if she’s a graduate student to support all those people. And if she’s going to have enough teaching and lab assistant work to support them all, she can’t get her PhD done. So she leaves, and it is a wrenching decision for her.

ADI IGNATIUS: So Carson has a lot going on. She finds a job writing radio scripts at the U.S. Bureau of Fisheries, which is the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service today. So in these scripts she’s basically translating biology into terms that ordinary listeners can understand. So, is that a path to her literary career?

NANCY KOEHN: She always wanted to be a bestselling author. So the true north that she’s following is, at an ambitious level, is to be a bestselling author. Her first book is published in 1941.

ADI IGNATIUS: Right. And that first book is called Under the Sea Wind, writing about the ocean, writing about the sea. And it was amazing writing. It’s based on an essay she published in The Atlantic in 1937. And I’m gonna read a little excerpt now.

NANCY KOEHN: Fantastic.

ADI IGNATIUS: “Who has known the ocean? Neither you nor I with our Earthbound senses, know the foam and surge of the tide that beats over the crab hiding under the seaweed of his tide pool home, or the lilt of the long, slow swells of mid-ocean, where shoals of wondering fish prey and are preyed upon. And the dolphin breaks the waves to breath the upper atmosphere.” This is good stuff. Where does this come from? This spark, this poetry.

NANCY KOEHN: It comes from a woman who had these literary gifts and worked throughout her life to cultivate them and improve them — married to this rigorous scientific knowledge, curiosity, and training that she had.

ADI IGNATIUS: So all right. So at this point she’s on her way. I mean, the reviews were strong, the science held up to scrutiny.

NANCY KOEHN: Sure. Her first book is published a week before the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, so it just disappears in the Second World War. For the next 12 years she continues to work as a government employee — a Federal government employee for the Fish and Wildlife Service — into the early 1950s, when she’s hard at work on what will become her first huge best seller, The Sea Around Us which is published in 1951.

ADI IGNATIUS: So, it sounds like there’s a pretty big gap between 1941, the publication of the first book, and 1951, the publication of the second one.

NANCY KOEHN: So, I think of that decade and a lot of her life as being emblematic of a concept I call the gathering years. She’s gathering all this information and assimilating this knowledge about the natural world through her work as a writer and editor — rising writer and editor at the Fish and Wildlife Service, leading a team of people. She’s a bureaucrat by day. At night she’s writing articles at home and she’s putting these two together. The articles she’s writing for the Baltimore Sun and The Atlantic and Scribner’s and Saturday Evening Post, while she’s working on the next book or conceptualizing the next book that she hopes will be a best seller. And that is what all real leaders spend time in those moments of their life. Moments when not a lot is happening in terms of checking things off your bucket list, right — your achievement dreams, your big life mission as you conceive at a particular time. There are moments when you don’t have to be getting X and Y and Z done, and making a big public splash. You can be investing in yourself. And think about those time periods, literally the way a financial advisor would say, or an entrepreneurial coach would say, ‘these are years when you’re going to really invest here and build the capabilities you need.’ And she does that throughout the 1940s. She does it at other moments in her life, but that’s the best example of it.

ADI IGNATIUS: So for Rachel Carson, she’s had some success. She’s gathering for the next round. But she also has a family that is depending on her that’s kind of knocking her off her game a little bit.

NANCY KOEHN: Sure. And she does, and it’s a big deal. And as the decade unfolds her sister will die and so will her father. She and her mother will be left to care for two teen adolescent girls, her nieces. And then one of them will grow up and have a child, and eventually Rachel will adopt that child when this woman dies. So she was a practical, a financial, an emotional pillar and critical source of support for all of her late 20s, all of her 30s, all of her 40s for her family. Every day she came home and she started getting dinner ready, with her mother, for her nieces and for her mother and herself. And then there was laundry to go in the wringer washer. And then there were lunches to make for the kids. And then there were bills to figure how they were going to pay. And then there was emotional support and conversation and bedtime stories. And so she didn’t settle into writing her stuff until 11 p.m. And she worked into the wee hours of the morning before getting up at seven to start the household. And it’s caretaking. Lots of different forms of it. It’s caretaking. And I think all that caretaking became part of who she was as a real leader. How she had this sense of responsibility and stewardship for people, ultimately for animals, for the natural world — as any worthy leader will tell you they have for the people they serve. Generals will tell you there’s an enormous amount of caretaking done in leading their troops. And there’s love and there’s attention to detail and there’s all that humanity. But let’s not underestimate how difficult it really was.

ADI IGNATIUS: So is the point — woulda, coulda, shoulda — she could have done more than she did? Or that this is exactly what gave her the kind of drive to do what she —

NANCY KOEHN: — The point is that she uses this difficult experience. She becomes an incredibly talented caretaker. That caretaking fuels her to think about what in the heck are we doing with the natural world in using these untested pesticides? And that becomes an incredibly important part of the book she writes, called Silent Spring, which is the stewardship, all Americans, all people owe to the Earth that supports us.

ADI IGNATIUS: Coming up after the break, it took Rachel Carson four years to write Silent Spring. We’ll trace her journey from nature writer to environmental leader.

ADI IGNATIUS: Welcome back to “Real Leaders,” a special series of the HBR IdeaCast. I’m Adi Ignatius with Nancy Koehn. Hey, Nancy.

NANCY KOEHN: Hey there, Adi.

ADI IGNATIUS: Before we start talking about Silent Spring, let’s hear a bit of the book that changed the world.

RACHEL CARSON: Chemicals are the sinister and little recognized partners of radiation in changing the very nature of the world, the very nature of its life. Non-selective chemicals that have the power to kill every insect, the good and the bad, to still a song of birds, the leaping of fish in the streams, to coat the leaves with a deadly film and to linger on in soil. All this, though the intended target may be only a few weeds or insects. Can anyone believe it is possible to lay down such a barrage of poisons on the surface of the Earth without making it unfit for all life? They should not be called insecticides, but biocides.

ADI IGNATIUS: So that’s a pretty clear indictment of an industry. DDT had been developed as synthetic insecticide in the late 30s. The Allies had used it in World War II to try to control malaria and typhus among the troops. And after the war it started to be rolled out commercially. The USDA began using it in aerial spraying to kill fire ants. So before we even talk about Rachel Carson, give us a little context.

NANCY KOEHN: Dow, Monsanto, Velsicol, a host of large chemical companies see this as a continuation of this rich revenue stream, this big market they’d had during the Second World War. A war in which for the first time in history more men did not die of insect-born disease than they did from gun fire. So it’s consider a triumph of science that these chemicals have killed mosquitos and other insects during the war. And these chemical companies are [saying] we need to figure out the commercial uses. There was wallpaper you could buy that had DDT sprayed on the back, so you could put it up to make sure like the bugs in your walls didn’t come. It was everywhere. You could spray your drapes with it. There were trucks that sprayed neighborhood streets with huge plumes of DDT. And so it was an extraordinary explosion in use, generated by companies that wanted to extend and expand the market and a United States Department of Agriculture which was in a sense the biggest purchaser. When she decides that we need to take a look at this, she knows that the large vested interests that are promoting these chemicals are not only the chemical companies, but also the U.S. government.

ADI IGNATIUS: So she’s doing this research. She’s talking to these people. You know, she’s reporting. It’s investigation journalism. It’s scientific research. Is anyone else doing this at the same time?

NANCY KOEHN: Several people have passed on it. Carson doesn’t want to do it. She doesn’t want to be a whistle blower or a muckraker. She’s known as a chronicler of the sea’s beauty and its majesty, and its scientific power and its ability to support man. She’s not known as someone who wags her finger and rings the bell on Monsanto or on the United States Department of Agriculture. So she’s very reluctant to go public and to take on a project about this. But after about six months of preliminary research she decides, “I can’t not do it.” Because no one else is doing it and because what she is learning about the effects of these chemicals is so very alarming. So she writes to a good friend of hers, Dorothy Freeman, she says, “I realized as much as I didn’t want to do this,” and this part’s a quote, “there would be no peace for me if I kept silent.” So there’s someone who’s not responding to the fireworks of her own narcissistic ambition. She’s responding to a duty she feels to try and understand this story because there’s something going on that could be very, very dangerous to the natural world.

ADI IGNATIUS: So in the middle of this difficult project — it’s not easy to get information and you’re running into a lot of walls — her health takes a bad turn. She develops metastasizing cancer that seems to be life threatening. So at this point, it’s almost like a race against time. Will she be able to complete her life’s work before her body gives out?

NANCY KOEHN: She’s diagnosed with cancer in the middle of 1960 and then given this more serious and much more complete diagnosis in November of 1960 from a very, very good oncologist at the Cleveland Clinic. And there is no chemotherapy — it’s important for our listeners to realize that. All they have is radiation to treat the monster of metastasizing breast cancer. So she undergoes all kinds of radiation treatments, which has a lot of very destructive secondary and tertiary effects for her. But she’s trying to finish the book, which is taking longer and longer and longer because she’s learning a great deal. So the story becomes larger than she envisioned it. It also becomes more complicated. And, here’s the most important thing about this race against the clock and her health — it has to unfold as she tries to get the story right. She is one of the most astounding examples of doing your homework. She dot’s every I, she crosses every T. She works very methodically and initially seemingly very slowly. She’s not working slowly, she’s just trying to unpack the story because the stakes, she thinks, are so high, she has to get it right. She said to her publisher, a man named Paul Brooks at Houghton Mifflin here in Boston, she said, “I had to set this work on an unshakeable foundation.” That’s a particularly important in our age right now of just cutting and pasting and sending stuff on, on the internet. This is the opposite of that. And she’s very careful. So the race is a real one and it’s made really complicated by the fact that her health keeps suffering, right. There’s a point when she has an eye infection and so she can’t see. So her research assistant and she are editing pages by having the assistant read to her and she’s editing with her voice. She becomes terribly ill with the effects of, physically ill and nauseous, with the effects of radiation. There’s one moment where she writes, this is in 1961, she’s so ill. She can barely get out of bed. She said, “If I was a superstitious person I would think there were dark forces trying to prevent me from finishing this book.” It’s astoundingly difficult.

ADI IGNATIUS: So the life lesson from Rachel Carson’s life is resilience. I mean, here’s somebody who might have given up and she kept pushing. She kept pushing.

NANCY KOEHN: We all have the potential to find that resilience within ourselves and to develop it. Resilience I’ve learned through all this work on leaders in crisis is a muscle, and you access it by facing some really difficult moment of doubt or despair — which she has many of — and getting close to that moment which we all know where you want to give up on something that’s important. It’s difficult. You know it matters, but you feel like at 2 a.m. when you can’t sleep, it’s just too hard. And she describes a moment like this and then describes how she thinks of what she’s trying to do and she says, “I realize I’ve got to keep going. I got to get up tomorrow and try again.” That moment is her first access, in this particular crucible, this critical moment, to resilience. And then the next time it happens that muscle gets a little stronger. And the next time it happens, we see this with all kinds of leaders. But you have to in a sense access that and then realize, and that becomes part of your memory, that the next time you get to a moment of great self-questioning and doubt, you go, “Wait a minute, six months ago I remember I was in the same place.” And that’s when you kick into that muscle again, and resilience grows from there.

ADI IGNATIUS: So despite the challenges, despite the health challenges, she does it. And in 1962 these serialized portions of the book appear in The New Yorker. By the end of 1962 the book is published. What was the reaction?

NANCY KOEHN: It creates a huge controversy. The New York Times runs a headline in the middle of the summer, this is in the wake of the serialization of The New Yorker, that says, “Silent Spring, Noisy Summer,” on the front page describing the clamor, the uproar over the book. And it’s an uproar caused by two different groups, vested interest, particularly chemical company representatives, USDA folks, and reporters that had signed on to say that this woman was a hysterical, nature-loving, tree-hugging, spinster. Those were words that were used about her. She was threatened with scores of lawsuits, civil lawsuits. Not one ever went anywhere because as one of the lawyers for The New Yorker said, “When you do your homework and you’ve got your facts, it’s very hard to sue anyone.” On the other hand there are all kinds of experts and what are beginning to be citizen activists, people like Stewart Udall, who was John F. Kennedy’s Secretary of the Interior, who recognized the incredible rigor and care and unsellable case she has now laid before the public. Congressional committees are formed to study pesticides. By 1964 those congressional subcommittees will have decided that DDT, heptachlor and other organic synthetic pesticides will be outlawed. They will not be sold. They will not be distributed. That ban will become almost global over the next 15 years.

ADI IGNATIUS: So eventually Silent Spring does in fact get DDT out of our lives. Help us connect the dots here. How do we get from the book to the environmental movement?

NANCY KOEHN: The EPA, the Endangered Species Act, the Clean Water Act, and the Clean Air Act will all be passed within 10 years of the book’s publication. At each stage of the way, different senators, activists, environmentalists, and leaders will take Silent Spring and say, “Here’s why we need to do this.” So the book will be a kind of bedrock of reasoning and motivation for government and citizen action toward forming a modern environmental movement with legislative guardrails.

ADI IGNATIUS: So it’s not an exaggeration, then, to say that this woman, this book, inspired a movement.

NANCY KOEHN: Not at all.

ADI IGNATIUS: So her story is amazing. Her impact is undeniable. I want to ask you, is this leadership? I mean, so in our company and in many companies you talk about people who are on a leadership track, or who are individual contributors. And both are essential and both are celebrated and respected. But the leader group tends to have followers and tends to have a team and, you know, the individual people are sort of out on their own. So help me understand why you would define Rachel Carson, not only as a great person, but as a great leader.

NANCY KOEHN: Because she exercises such a profound impact on other people. And because the book is an invitation, a call to action, a siren song, a gauntlet dropped before people which both respects their intelligence and respects their agency. That’s what leaders do. Individual contributors, as important as they are, are checking things off for the company, or themselves, or the client — and they’re done. It’s not about how other people make the world better. That is all this book is about. So, I think she’s an incredibly important example of a leader. And there’s one other thing to say about Carson as a leader. She was an introvert. She was shy. And yet she had more impact than most presidents. So, I like to say to people, what’s so really memorable about her leadership is how it demonstrates that leaders come in all forms. A quiet, shy, introvert can be as powerful as the most hard charging, charismatic, brilliant speaker, and make the world better. So, leaders come in different forms and she was a heck of a leader.

HANNAH BATES: That was Harvard Business School historian Nancy Koehn, in conversation with HBR editor-in-chief Adi Ignatius on the HBR IdeaCast. That episode was produced by Anne Saini and edited by Curt Nickisch, with technical help from Rob Eckhardt. If you liked this episode, search for HBR Ideacast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. They release new episodes every week. HBR On Leadership will be back next Wednesday with another hand-picked conversation about leadership from the Harvard Business Review.  In the meantime, we have another curated feed that you should check out: HBR On Strategy. And visit us any time at HBR.org, where you can subscribe to Harvard Business Review and explore articles, videos, case studies, books, and of course, podcasts, that will help you manage yourself, your teams, and your career. This episode of HBR On Leadership was produced by Anne Saini and me, Hannah Bates. The show was created by Anne Saini, Ian Fox, and me. Music by Coma-Media. Special thanks to Maureen Hoch, Adi Ignatius, Karen Player, Anne Bartholomew, and you – our listener. See you next week.