As an exclamation point to the 40th anniversary of "Silent Spring," Pittsburgh Mayor Tom Murphy today will announce the formation of a committee to come up with ideas for a permanent memorial to its author, Rachel Carson.
No further details about the nature of the tribute will be available until today's announcement at Chatham College by Murphy and Chatham President Esther Barazzone, according to the mayor's office. Carson, a Springdale native, graduated from Chatham in 1929, when it was known as the Pennsylvania College for Women.
Already an accomplished and commercially successful writer following the publication of "Under the Sea Wind" in 1941 and "The Sea Around Us" in 1951, Carson's seminal 1962 book "Silent Spring" built on that following and burnished her reputation as a writer and scientist. It has been called one of the most influential books of the last century.
It still sells more than 25,000 copies a year and earned Carson mention in Time magazine as the only woman in the top 20 scientists and thinkers of the 20th century.
"It is a wholesome and necessary thing," Carson wrote in her last, posthumously published book "The Sense of Wonder," "for us to turn again to the earth and in the contemplation of her beauties to know the sense of wonder and humility."
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