“Silent Springs, Windswept Seas: Rachel Carson’s Environmental Vision,” an exhibit curated by Carla Baricz and James Kessenides, is on display on the second floor of Yale University’s Beinecke Library until October 4, 2026.
In late July, I took the train to New Haven to visit the exhibition, and to talk with Carla and James about how they designed it. A few days earlier, when the skies had been yellow and sticky with wildfire smoke in Boston, I’d had dinner with a friend who remarked that the dull haze above us was a glimpse into the future, when we would resort to spraying aerosols into the sky to geoengineer ourselves a livable planet. Something about the finality of a permanently white sky filled me with utter dread, and it hung around me for days. I wondered idly on the train if Carson had felt this way at the prospect of a silent spring, but I decided that there were many reasons – historical context, climatic context – that this idea would fall apart on closer inspection, and so I dismissed it.
Carla and James met me at the entrance of the Beinecke, where I also met Rachel Herschman, Yale Library’s first Director of Exhibitions and Publication. The Beinecke has had regular temporary exhibits on its first and second floors since it opened in 1963, but Rachel was brought on board to expand the library’s approach. One of the initiatives she undertook was asking her colleagues at different libraries around campus if they would like to curate an exhibit. That was how James and Carla came to work on the Carson exhibit, they explained to me, as we walked up the stairs to the introductory banner. Carla is the Librarian for Literature in English and Comparative Literature, and James is the Librarian for American History: both of them usually work out of the Sterling Memorial Library. Carson’s papers are among the most consulted items in the Beinecke’s collection, and it has been twenty years since the last exhibit about her took place at Yale.
I was curious about how the process of designing an exhibit about someone differed from writing about them in a book or an article. The first thing Carla and James explained to me was how profoundly the exhibit space, and the way visitors moved around it, shaped the narrative they were constructing. Visitors can follow the suggested layout of the exhibit – moving clockwise around the cases to follow the chronology of Carson’s life – or just visit a few cases, each of which examines a particular theme (childhood, research, relationships, the publication and reception of her books, her legacy, her inspirations, etc.). Through this thematic arrangement, Carla and James were able to avoid a typical problem associated with making an exhibit about an individual – that it becomes a linear biography that requires visitors to proceed around the room in one specific way. They explained that they wanted people to be able to hop between different cases, and develop their own understanding of Carson. One of the ways they embraced this narrative unpredictability was by having various themes repeat across different cases: for instance, the atom bomb appears both in a case on Carson’s early writing just after World War II, and in a case examining associations between DDT and the nuclear age.
The second floor of the Beinecke contains two permanent items – J.J. Audubon’s Birds of America and a Gutenberg Bible – which the curators of any temporary exhibit can incorporate, or not, as they please. Carla and James opened Birds of America to show two carefully chosen birds. On one side was a bald eagle – a bird which, in the popular imagination, Carson is credited with saving. On the other was a tawny thrush, a bird which both Carson and Dorothy Freeman, her close companion with whom she exchanged letters with often, loved and referenced frequently. The two birds could be seen as symbolic of Carson’s public and private life. Carson was also a member of the Audubon Society, through which she met many of her connections and informants.
When it came to the Gutenberg Bible, the curators opened it to the Book of Job, one of the earliest examples of nature writing in the West, which Carson invoked in The Sea Around Us (1951). On the other side of the case is a photograph of the Sólheimajökull Glacier in Iceland by James Balog. By putting these two pieces of media together, Carla and James wanted to encourage visitors to consider the different ways the environment has been represented over time, and through very different technologies – from moveable type to photography.
What struck me most about the exhibit was how successfully Carla and James were able to show Carson’s writing process. It’s easy to think of writing as solitary work, but if the exhibit has an argument, it is, I think, that part of Carson’s success lay in how social and collaborative her writing process was. She read the manuscript for her first book, Under the Sea Wind (1941), aloud to her mother, who typed up new drafts for her daughter to line edit every day. Carson wrote to people constantly: to, for instance, the Norwegian sailor Thor Heyerdahl, to gather his experiences of marine mammals during his crossing of the Pacific Ocean; to Marjorie Spock and Mary Richards, who brought a suit against the US government for the use of DDT on their land in 1958; to contacts she had made at the Audubon Society; or to chemical companies asking for information about their products. Carla and James describe Carson as a “peerless synthesizer”: she was capable of taking in vast quantities of specialized, disparate knowledge, and then transforming it into legible, beautiful prose aimed at a general audience. Magazine writing was central to her development and success as a writer, too. The Sea Trilogy originated in an essay published in The Atlantic in 1937; chapters of Silent Spring (1962) and The Sea Around Us were serialized in The New Yorker and Vogue, among other venues. Writing for magazines allowed Carson to get her ideas in front of a general audience and make herself visible to people who could share information with her. Such writing was also an important income source, especially in the early years of her career.
In constructing the exhibit, Carla and James had also wanted to avoid idealizing Carson and to acknowledge her blind spots. They explained this as we arrived at the second last case in the exhibit, which focuses on Black, Indigenous and urban environmentalisms. “Carson’s greatest intellectual insight was to displace the default perspective of humans from our understanding of the natural world, but the flip side of this was a lack of social perspective and history in her writings,” explains the accompanying text. It also included an Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) report from 1971 on the impact of urban pesticides on the poor, the occupation of Alcatraz by a group of Native American college students from 1969–71, and a letter from Al Gore’s office declining an invitation from the environmental justice group Jesus People Against Pollution (Gore, notably, wrote the introduction to a new edition of Silent Spring which came out in 1994).
In the very last case, which studies Carson’s impact on nature writing, Carla and James chose to include a poem from Black lesbian feminist author Audre Lorde, “The Brown Menace or Poem to the Survival of Roaches,” published in 1970. Carson had written about the possibility of insects adapting to survive pesticides. Lorde’s poem, the accompanying text explains, “offers a powerful metaphor of Black survival in the face of unrelenting racism.” Carla and James said that they didn’t know whether Lorde had read Carson or not, or what her reaction might have been if she had. They wanted to include the poem in the exhibit because of how it differed from Carson’s work, even though they were both thinking about insects. The power of this exhibit is, I think, in its enthusiasm for different forms of resonance across time and space. It’s hard to find room for this kind of associational thinking in the way many of us have been trained to write, and it may be that there is something about writing that requires a kind of specificity that stifles it. But within the exhibit space itself, it seemed entirely useful to see familiarity in the past – to put two pieces of writing about insects beside one another and let them chirp, or to imagine a sky sprayed white and hear a silent spring – even as we hurtle into an unknown future.
*Cover image: Installation view of Silent Springs, Windswept Seas: Rachel Carson’s Environmental Vision at Beinecke Library, Yale University. Photo by Samantha Annette Photography. Courtesy of Yale University. Used with permission.
[Cover Image description: A large curved display in the exhibition space with shelves featuring exhibition items and text saying: “In nature nothing exists alone.”]
Edited by Teja Šosterič; reviewed by Deniz Karakaş.
