Getting to know Rachel Carson: best-selling author, scientist, conservationist, advocate

Biologist/author Rachel Carson standing seaside, examining specimen in jar. (Photo by Alfred Eisenstaedt/The LIFE Picture Collection via Getty Images)

Rachel Carson was famously one of the essential sparks in the environmental movement and, although lacking the usual scientific credentials, a major force in national scientific debates. Yet she was a shy, retiring and humble person. How did she come to have such an important influence? What roles did her writing and her ties to Lincoln County play? And what can we learn from her that would inform our current debates on climate and conservation? In an online lecture co-hosted by Lincoln County Historical Association and Old Bristol Historical Society, Barbara Vickery will begin to answer these questions and introduce us to one of our region’s most well known and influential figures.

Barbara Vickery

About our speaker, Barbara St. John Vickery
After serving as rare plant botanist with the Maine Critical Areas Program. Barbara joined the staff of The Nature Conservancy Maine in 1983 as Director of Science and Stewardship and later served as Director of Conservation Programs until retirement in 2017. After her husband’s death she worked with a team to edit her husband Peter Vickery’s life work, Birds of Maine, published in 2020. She serves on the Maine Board of Environmental Protection and Forest Society of Maine board, is an active member of the Citizen’s Climate Lobby Midcoast Maine chapter, and is a member of six local organizations whose trails she uses regularly, including the wonderful trails of LCHA’s Pownalborough Court House across the Kennebec from her home in Richmond.

Preregistration is required for this online program: click here to register

Thank you to Series Supporter J. Edward Knight Insurance for helping LCHA make this program available for free!