Thinkers Timeline

Rachel Carson (1907-1964) was an American marine biologist, writer, and conservationist. She was born in rural Pennsylvania and developed a love of the natural world from childhood, spending hours outdoors observing the life around her family's farm. She studied biology at Johns Hopkins University, where she was one of very few women in the sciences, and worked as a marine biologist for the US Fish and Wildlife Service for many years. She was also a gifted writer who published three acclaimed books about the sea before Silent Spring. In 1962 she published Silent Spring, a carefully researched and beautifully written account of how synthetic pesticides, particularly DDT, were accumulating through food chains and destroying bird populations, insect communities, and entire ecosystems. The book was met with a massive campaign of attack from the chemical industry, which attempted to discredit both her science and her personally, including attacks on her as a hysterical woman and a communist. She died of breast cancer in 1964, two years after the book's publication, never knowing the full extent of its influence. Silent Spring is widely credited with launching the modern environmental movement and leading to the banning of DDT in the United States and the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency.

Lynn Margulis (1938-2011) was an American biologist and theorist. She was born Lynn Alexander in Chicago, graduated from the University of Chicago at eighteen, and went on to earn a doctorate from the University of California, Berkeley. She spent most of her academic career at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. In the 1960s, while still in her twenties, she developed her theory of serial endosymbiosis: the argument that the complex cells found in animals, plants, and fungi, called eukaryotic cells, evolved through a process in which smaller bacteria were incorporated into, and eventually became permanent parts of, larger cells. The mitochondria that produce energy in animal cells, and the chloroplasts that perform photosynthesis in plant cells, were originally free-living bacteria that were engulfed by larger cells and eventually became unable to live independently. This theory, which fundamentally changed how biologists understood the evolution of complex life, was rejected fifteen times before it was finally published in 1967. She also co-developed the Gaia hypothesis with the chemist James Lovelock, arguing that the Earth's biological and physical systems interact as a self-regulating whole. She died in 2011 from a stroke.

Robin Wall Kimmerer (born 1953) is an American botanist, ecologist, and writer who is a citizen of the Potawatomi Nation, one of the Indigenous peoples of the Great Lakes region of North America. She grew up in the Adirondack Mountains of New York State and has described how questions about plants and the natural world led her to science and to her own Indigenous heritage in equal measure. She studied botany and ecology, earned a doctoral degree, and became a professor of environmental biology at the State University of New York. She founded the Center for Native Peoples and the Environment, which works to bring together Indigenous knowledge and Western science in the service of ecological restoration. She is best known for her book Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants (2013), which has become one of the most widely read books about the natural world in recent years. In it she weaves together scientific ecology and Potawatomi traditional knowledge to argue for a fundamentally different relationship between human beings and the living world.