Free On a Farther Shore by William Souder

explained that the “mastery and utilization of the forces of nature” arose from the knowledge gained through research that did not necessarily have such utilitarian purposes to begin with. Knowledge, he wrote, permits nature to be “harnessed, controlled, and directed to economic advantage.” When the practical applications of marine research aren’t immediately apparent, Higgins said, such knowledge nonetheless makes “permanent contributions to social progress” even if it takes time to figure out what those contributions are.
    Carson seems to have looked upon the great wealth of scientific research suddenly at her fingertips in a completely different way. For one thing, her assignment—how glorious to have one again—was to write about science. What could be better? It was like getting paid to do homework, the very thing she was best at. As she went about the work of writing short, easily consumed radio scripts, the storyteller inside her came alive again. In early 1936, just months after starting at the bureau, after having her mother neatly type up the manuscript, Carson sent off a long, loosely written piece on Chesapeake Bay shad fishing to the
Baltimore Sun
—which promptly bought it.Carson’s first newspaper story, “It’ll Be Shad Time Soon,” ran in the
Baltimore Sun Sunday Magazine
on March 1, 1936. Carson got a check for twenty dollars.
    Over the next four years, Carson became a frequent contributor to the
Sun
, writing on a variety of wildlife subjects and being paid ten or twenty dollars for each. These stories involved little conventional journalism—Carson was not an interviewer or investigator by nature—and were more often than not about places she had never been and things she had never witnessed. She wrote about tuna fishing off Nova Scotia and oyster farming in the Chesapeake Bay. She wrote about how duck numbers were gradually increasing after years of wetland drainage and how overhunting had decimated waterfowl populations. She wrote about problems with starlings overwintering in the Baltimore area. Returning to one of her favorite subjects, Carson wrote a piece about eels and their incomprehensible migrationfrom the Sargasso Sea to the very same coastal bays and streams from which their parents had come, but which the new generation could recognize only by instinct. “Chesapeake Eels Seek the Sargasso Sea” ran in the Sunday
Sun
on October 9, 1938.
    Carson also sold a couple of stories to the
Richmond Times-Dispatch Sunday Magazine
. In “Fight for Wildlife Pushes Ahead,” an ambitious, sweeping piece about the former abundance of North American wildlife before European settlement and the long, steady decline in animal populations that had followed, Carson’s consideration of these losses and the efforts then under way to reverse the trend hinted at the depth of her affection for the natural world:
    But what of wildlife today? Government services whose business it is to know conditions paint a general picture of scarcity and depletion. The last heath hen perished on the island of Martha’s Vineyard in 1933, and the passenger pigeon is now a creature of legend. Salmon are virtually gone from the rivers of New England, and the Atlantic coast shad fisheries have declined some 80 percent within a half a century. Waterfowl flights fell to their lowest point in all their history in 1933 and 1934, and although government regulations plus the establishment of sanctuaries have resulted in some improvement, the plight of certain species, notably canvasback and redhead duck, remains serious. The ranks of elk were so thinned by 1904 that domestication was urged as the only means of preventing their extinction. Although pronghorn antelope are now on the increase within refuges and reservations, they are reduced from some 30,000,000 or 40,000,000 to about 60,000. Mountain goats, moose, and Grizzly bear are also on the wane.
    In July 1936, Carson was appointed to a full-time position at the