We are joined by Rebecca Henson, Founder and Director of the Springsong Museum in Silver Spring, Maryland, which promises to be a world-class community museum dedicated to the life and legacy of Rachel Carson. With a background in history and environmental policy, and as a Silver Spring local, Rebecca tells us about Rachel Carson—a writer, biologist, and Montgomery County resident who is often regarded as the “Mother of the Modern Environmental Movement.” She also shares her own journey to discovering this visionary and the importance of connecting with the place where one lives.
With a shared interest in history, environmental work, the world around her, and the interconnection between humans and nature—and especially the fact that Rachel Carson touched so much of the very community Rebecca and her family call home—Rebecca felt a deep kinship with Rachel. This connection inspired her to learn more about the woman and eventually dedicate her time to bringing the Springsong Museum to life. Rebecca shares a personal struggle and how the idea of material immortality—something she discovered is a tenet of Rachel Carson’s work—along with her own connection to the seashore, helped her heal and led her to the work she does today.
Surrounded by 25 acres of nature, the Springsong Museum is being designed to merge nature and accessibility through the efforts of many community members. It stands as a true celebration of renewal, nature, and community.
We hope you enjoy listening to Rebecca’s journey of discovering Rachel Carson, and, along the way, learning so much about herself and the community around her. We encourage you to follow the Springsong Museum’s journey and visit it once it opens!
—
Listen to the podcast here
Discovering Rachel Carson: Rebecca Henson On Legacy, Nature, And Building Community At The Springsong Museum
This is Ina Gjikondi and Bonnie Buckner, and with us is Rebecca Henson. Rebecca is the founder and executive director of the Springsong Museum here in Silver Spring, Maryland. Rebecca is a Maryland master naturalist and mom to two nature-loving boys. She worked at Nature Forward’s Woodland Sanctuary and on a deforestation-related project for the non-profit CERES. Previously, she spent nearly nine years at Calvert Investments, leading environmental screening and engagement. She serves as vice president of the board of the Neighbors of Northwest Branch and is a devoted Baltimore Orioles fan. Rebecca has degrees in history from Vanderbilt University and politics, policy, and society, focused on comparative environmental policy, from the University of Bath in the UK.
She believes deeply in leaning into wherever it is one lives. Thank you and welcome. Welcome, Rebecca. We are really happy to have you with us, and I’d love to just get us started. The way I ran into you is as I was doing some research on Rachel Carson, and I got so excited to know more about her story, read her book The Silent Spring, and then The Sense of Wonder, and watched a few documentaries. I was just so inspired by the life of this woman that I did not know as much as I would have wanted to know and as much as I think a lot of people need to know.
As I was doing a little search, I ran into you, and I saw a little bit about the work you’re doing with Springsong Museum, and I was very inspired. I would love for you to just tell us a little bit about the vision for Springsong Museum and the story, your story. How did you come to it?
About The Springsong Museum
Great. Thanks, Ina. It’s been so lovely to get to know you better and hear how you came to Rachel Carson, because that in itself is something that’s pretty interesting to me, to see how all of us who have some interest in her, just the various ways that we’ve come to her since most of us were not around, or at least adults, at the time that The Silent Spring came out. For me, there were probably 100 different things that led to this project happening for me and to that moment of deciding to make it happen, put different puzzle pieces together, and really commit myself to it. Before that, there were just years of seeing her quotes pop up in different places.
My background was in history, but then environmental policy, and someone like me should have had a pretty good sense of who she was. I had no clue. When I found out that not only did I barely know who she was, and I knew The Silent Spring and that it was important because it was a wake-up call to Americans and then some abroad as well about the dangers of synthetic pesticides, I didn’t realize that that was the very end of her life and her career that she wrote it.
Who Is Rachel Carson
Just a question for our listeners. Can you just say a little bit more about who she was? Because maybe not everybody knows that.
Absolutely. Rachel Carson was born in 1907, and she passed away in 1964. She was 56 years old when she passed away. She was first and foremost a writer. She considered herself a biographer of the sea, and she saw it as her goal in life to make science and nature accessible through her writing. That was her goal, her thesis, always, from when she was a fifteen-year-old writing about her walks in Pennsylvania near her house, all the way through to Silent Spring. The thesis is around interconnection, that all life on Earth is interconnected, and that we’re connected in place and throughout time as well. She wrote books and articles on the sea, on the oceans, really trying to share her sense of wonder with the reading public, making it very easily understood, but also in poetic language that would entice readers to read more.
Near the end of her life, she wrote about synthetic pesticides, mainly DDT, but actually a host of other synthetic pesticides as well. Interconnection was present and critical to that entire endeavor with The Silent Spring, but so was an overarching message that humans need humility, especially when it comes to technology that we develop. In this case, that technology was synthetic chemical pesticides, that we can and should do things in an intelligent way. She didn’t believe in the banning of all pesticides. She believed that if we use something with that great of a power for harm, we should do so intelligently, sparingly, and selectively. To really use our brains and to be intentional.
Humans need humility, especially when it comes to technology that we develop.
She was a magazine writer. She wrote for the Baltimore Sun. That was her first real paid job. She had a master’s degree in zoology, really marine zoology, and was a federal worker with the Fish and Wildlife Service until her personal writing career had taken off to a point that she could, as she said, devote her life to writing. She died in 1964 from breast cancer and complications from breast cancer. That too was a story of its time because she was not told of her prognosis by surgeons here in Washington, D.C. They advised her that there was nothing she needed to do and really there was nothing to worry about when they knew at the time from biopsies that she had malignant breast cancer. That also is a vital part of the creation of her final book, The Silent Spring. She finished it in her bed, writing it as a very sick person, and she died eighteen months later.
As much as it would hinder her on a day-to-day basis, having such a terrible disease, and she had a host of other illnesses at the same time with her eyes and bones and other things, I do believe it did give her that sense of urgency for her own self, but that connection to a theme that she has throughout her books, which is these eternal cycles of life and death, of material immortality, that we go on in other ways, that all things go on in other ways and really essentially make the future. I do think that not only motivated her but actually inspired the work itself.
Discovering Rachel Carson
Rebecca, how did you then come to discover more of her and what moved you to get to know her in new ways?
Once I did start looking into her history, I kept seeing that she lived in Silver Spring, Maryland, and that then just was the final straw. Here I am, living in Silver Spring, Maryland, with this background in environmental work and history. I love to read nature-inspired reading, all of this, and I didn’t know that we had this local hero in our historic midst. I found out that she lived in the neighborhood where I live. It’s where she won the National Book Award. She was living right here, and it’s just a few blocks from our local public elementary school. That too, just realizing, feeling like I was late to the game in a way, but that it was a game that no one else also realized was going on, that we had this wonderful story, this wonderful life that happened right here in the woods around here, the neighborhoods, the schools.
She touched a lot of different points in our community, and we needed these messages that I was discovering more than ever. I did see elements in some of the books that I’d been reading that touched on similar themes to Carson’s, but also I was working at a small bookshop in Chevy Chase, Maryland, for the local Audubon Society, and that was a joy in itself. It was a part-time job that I was doing in addition to other jobs, but being surrounded by books and people who would come in seeking that wonder that Rachel writes about, or they might already have that wonder, but were seeking some community to share it in or further education in certain areas of natural history.
I was looking for quotes to put on the wall in our writer’s section, and I came across hers from 1954, “The more clearly we can focus our attention on the wonders and realities of the universe about us, the less taste we shall have for destruction.” That summed up so much. I think what some of us are just maybe born knowing or feeling, that there are these wonders about us, whether it’s a tiny piece of grass growing between concrete or vast wonders like the oceans that Carson would write about. We can tell that if we give our energies to those things, we generally aren’t going to favor the more destructive habits of our society or of ourselves.
Again, with that, I thought, “I thought she only had written about pesticides, and I thought she’d only written about the doom-and-gloomier part of that.” Even in that quote about destruction of society, I realized the bulk of her career is actually the wonder part of it. It’s sharing that wonder, letting the public know that you don’t need to be an expert in any science to appreciate science and seek that truth that science attempts to give us, and to really just feel that gratitude to the natural world and share that with our own children or others in our community.
I’d been reading Underland: A Deep Time Journey by Robert McFarlane a few years ago, and in that, the stories of our relationship with Earth and deep time, really, and geology and the underland. He talked about burials near the shore or along the shore, I believe it was in the UK, but burial sites that are found right near the shore. Just this idea that the shore is a place of constant recreation. It’s the creation story of human beings, which is a Carson theme. Something that Rob pointed out, this idea of material immortality, that the calcium carbonate that disintegrates from us will then be part of others, their bones, their shells, other things. What a neat thing to think that we truly are connected in a scientific way as well.
I was interested in that idea of material immortality, and at the same time, as I was looking for these quotes for the bookshop, I realized Rachel’s actually one that, if she hadn’t coined this term, it’s essential to her writing. She made it, at least for a time, a popular concept. Rob’s writing brought me back to the UK, brought me back to something that was relevant or that had its genesis here in Silver Spring, Maryland, which just, again, boggled me, the way that we might not know what’s right beneath our feet, the stories, and some of that natural history as well. It was also a nice way, or just a vital way, for me to deal with some personal loss at the time. I don’t think I had realized that maybe I was seeking some of these stories of life’s infinite qualities.
After having a miscarriage, knowing that I felt very drawn to the sea, and I didn’t know why. This was before I’d read any of her books. I didn’t really have that sense of the sea being this essential part of our history as human beings or anything like that. Places like Assateague Island, Chincoteague, that are these barrier islands that are essentially and completely defined by change, and rapid change all the time, and incessant change. Thinking of at least bringing my sadness at that point to a place like that and bringing some of the spirit of this loss that I had to a place where it was almost in hyperspeed, that turning over and recycling of materials, and it’s some type of a maybe a spirit too, or at least the energy maybe of it all. I found it really comforting, but also energizing in a way to come back from visiting the shore after this small loss.
It was soon after that that I had been driving by a building here in Silver Spring that sits right in between the two neighborhoods where Carson wrote all of her books. It’s on 25 miles of trails right in the fall zone where the Piedmont Plateau crashes into the coastal plain and makes these gorgeous falls, and is deep geologic time. You can just see it there, plainly, the way that the water and the winds have sculpted the metamorphic rock there. There’s been a building there for six decades that has been empty. I could just see it driving by that it had this sign that said Rachel Carson or something more creative, but Rachel Carson Museum.
It would be somewhere people could just be and be together. That need for human connection was at the top of many of our hearts, even if we weren’t recognizing it yet. Just thinking of a space that hadn’t been loved, a place that hadn’t been loved, that was filled with lead and asbestos, but yet right on a major highway and on our bus rapid transit line and next to a Trader Joe’s, it was where people were already. It just seemed that, yes, this place needed some actual love and life put into it, but that we all needed that as well. There really could not have been a better lens through which to see our world than this local hero of Rachel Carson, who, there is no museum that celebrates her message or her story.
The Springsong Museum Experience
The thing that’s really resounding to me is this idea of renewal coming up and all the different touch points that you’ve talked about. I’m curious, from a visitor’s perspective, if I go to the museum, I’m coming to visit the museum, what is my experience there? What are my senses? What’s going to be that experience?
That’s a great question. We’re working on developing the visitor experience of what the exhibits and the programming will look like. A lot of that will come from what the building will look like, which is also in progress, because we’re working to make the building, just as Carson wanted nature and science to be accessible in her writing, we want this museum to just take that message of accessibility and really live it. We have a lot of work to do first on creating the physical museum, just the adaptive reuse of this or renewal, as you’re saying, of this building itself, and then creating an addition that could have an elevator and a wheelchair-accessible overlook so that you can see this part of the Anacostia River, this northwest branch of it near where she lived and where these falls are.
The first part is really just tackling the physical complexity of this spot. We’re working with wonderful landscape architects from Baltimore, Pungu, who will be really interpreting the entire landscape there through Rachel’s The Sense of Wonder. Rachel wanted to write a full-length book on the topic of wonder and awe and how we can all share in that and how it benefits the environment, but first it benefits the individual and families and communities as well.
Through The Sense of Wonder and really The Five Senses, Pungu has interpreted this almost three acres of property right there along the highway so that we are constantly reminded that we are in this modern world, and this is the world too that Rachel wrote in, but that we can still smell certain flowers and feel the water rushing, and different experiences that can share that wonder and maybe spark some further interest too in where we live in this place. One thing we’ve found that’s scattered around the landscape at the site, that you see all over Silver Spring, is the mineral mica or muscovite. It’s all over, and it’s how Silver Spring got its name hundreds of years ago. The vast majority of us here have no idea of that, that we are very much connected to place just in our very name.
We’ve found, going to different schools, talking to kids, bringing pieces of mica, that there is this sense of pride and belonging that happens almost instantaneously after you share that mineral with them and share that piece of information. It’s something they can go home and tell their parents about, who very well might not be from this country, and it’s an instant way to feel connected to place. That mica was made so very long ago, it’s another connection through time as well.
It’s really widening our lens, and that’s something we hope for visitors to experience through, whether it’s geologic time or how we think about the importance of plankton or microscopic creatures that Carson wrote a lot about and had a lot of respect for, like the barnacle, and how wondrous and mighty and tough the barnacle is. So, really, I think shifting or encouraging the acceptance or the possibilities of other ways of perceiving where we are and who we are. We’ll do that through art as well, so it won’t just be native plantings, but art and music are another way that Carson saw this idea of interconnection and just the value of the natural world as being shared. We want to integrate the arts and visual arts and music too into that experience.
She also, in The Sense of Wonder, talked about the importance of intergenerational experiences of nature and nature education being this intergenerational experience for all of us, the importance of just one adult connecting with a child about the natural world. That’s something that we would like to be very clear in our museum, that the seniors that live in our community are very much part of the genesis of this project. They will volunteer, there’ll be opportunities to play music in the art gallery that overlooks the creek, run programs with children, and help steward our gardens there as well. That is something that I think feels unique in America, not just respect for an older population, but just making sure that they feel part of a community still and really get that exposure both ways between children and older folks, and vice versa.
What feels unique in America right now is showing not just respect for an older population but making sure that they still feel part of a community still.
Creating A Community
What I find unique also, Rebecca, is how you, at least what you’ve shared, and I’d love if you could share a little bit more about that as well, but how the community has come together to work and develop and build this idea. Even what you’re sharing, you’re already doing outreach, you’re engaging, you’re bringing people together, so the programming already has started. People are engaging, and not to talk about all the efforts of getting the building, the fundraising, bringing the right people. Can you say more about that? Along with that, I’d love if you also spoke about the name of the museum and how you came to it.
We’ve had so many wonderful books and movies and podcasts and so many different things that were specifically about the environment, and yet we’re still in a somewhat similar place to where we were in Rachel’s time. I was hopeful by listening to what community members had been long talking about at my children’s baseball games, or volunteering at my kids’ schools, or working in a bookshop, that there might be a way to shapeshift some of these ideas and themes that seemed so important for this time, and especially Carson’s into a physical place. It felt that many people were overwhelmed with how much bad news there was in particular, or just bad stories that they would hear. I couldn’t think of any ways to really combat that, but taking Carson’s story out of only being content that, for example, would be read through her books, how can we share it in a physical way?
Hearing from so many neighbors that wanted more assets in our part of the county, we have the lowest-income part of our county, Montgomery County in Maryland, we have the highest amount of people from other countries, which is so exciting, and the resources need to be there too, to celebrate that and to help community, our community, feel like it has a real place here.
I think the first week of the project, I’d registered as a non-profit so I could start doing some of the work, really reaching out to our parks department about the property. I called the museum Rachel Carson Place of Wonder just so I could start getting things rolling and be official and get a website and other things, but within a week, a good friend of mine who’s Latina, she is the Maryland conservation advocate for a local organization, said, “Let’s talk about the name of it.” She was very honest and so helpful and just said, “You might want to consider something that, for a lot of us from other traditions, we want to feel that there’s a collective voice rather than this one person who did this great thing in history. We tend to see things through a more collective voice.” It was exactly what we needed to hear.
It was so helpful, she was just so spot on, and it created so much more from what we could give through a name. Rachel was also very humble. She never wanted much focus on her personally, and so the name never sat right with me anyway. I didn’t really want her name in it. I spent some time thinking with some volunteers too, but thinking through Rachel’s writings, and because Rachel too wasn’t so focused on herself. She did see this as a collective voice of humanity and also of creatures, especially the birds, that are seeking to defend this, the natural beauty, and the health of the natural environment. We kept coming back to the idea of, we’re in Silver Spring, and her book was The Silent Spring.
It would be helpful if we could play on some of those names as well. Then I found a few different quotes of Rachel’s talking about the importance of birdsong in her life. She talks about it as a child all the way through, both as inspiring her and motivating her, but also giving her a sense of community, being able to walk outside and feeling right away, there are my friends up in the tree. There was a quote that she wrote, or a line that she wrote to her dearest friend Dorothy after she had submitted the drafts of The Silent Spring and the editor at The New Yorker had reviewed them, William Shawn.
She says in the letter, she describes what a feeling of joy and relief she has in completing this task, and she says here and in other places that she would not have been able to live with herself if she had not done all she could. She links that to birdsong. She says, “I could never again listen to the song of a thrush,” which was her favorite type of bird, “if she wasn’t doing all that she could do and had done.” We settled on Springsong because it is this sonic proof of life that comes back every spring that is totally miraculous and does give almost all of us, hopefully, a sense of awe in the natural world. But it is that collective voice.
It’s not just one bird that we hear throughout the spring, it’s the spring peepers, the frogs also, that are a signal to us that spring is coming. She also says in The Sense of Wonder about the importance of the dawn chorus and that it’s the throb of life continuing, and I love that as well. We will seek to center most of the museum’s story on this idea of wonder. It’s what Rachel wanted to write more about at the end of her life. She wanted to write a full-length book on wonder, but because of cancer, she wasn’t able to. We’re hoping that with the different programming that we’re already doing and then, obviously, with the physical museum, that message can continue to live on, that she was so drawn to and that she believed had so much power for all of us.
A Big Sense Of Wonder
Can you tell us, Rebecca, a moment in your time in your own life where you really had that very big sense of wonder?
When I was a little girl, I would look for it every year to go to the ocean in the summer, and I would get there and could run to the beach and would just stand there and start to acclimate to the cold because it was the Atlantic Ocean and it’s cold water. But I was always hit with this almost existential feeling of the vastness of the ocean and how it did. You’re just standing there looking out, and all you see is the ocean, and all you hear is the steady beat of the waves crashing. In some ways, it’s disorienting. It’s taking you completely out of your normal, typical life, and I remember that sense of sadness, but what I think it really was, was awe and feeling this connection to life throughout time, a feeling of nostalgia too for my mom, who had brought me there, and just realizing, I’m another year older and time just continues.
At the sea and at the ocean, it still is a lot of the constant chatter in the brain, and it’s just almost shocking. It’s in the sensory experience of it, the water and the sights and the breeze and the smells. Another time too, throughout my life, I’ve been attuned to the natural world. I moved a lot, but any place that we moved to, I would go out and find a creek if there was one, or at least a tree that was something special at least. When I lived in Nashville, Tennessee, in college, we went to a park just south of Nashville, and I was taking a geology class at the time and looked down and found a rock that had a fossilized shell in it. I couldn’t believe it because here we are in Tennessee, and at that time too, as a freshman in college, Nashville didn’t really feel like home, or the South didn’t feel like a place that I belonged, at least easily.
Finding this just blew my mind to think how in the world this sea creature got here of all places. I took it back to the geology lab, and the professor and I looked at it under the microscope, and she was showing me different parts that you couldn’t see with the eye. She explained about the warm sea, the coral seas that used to exist across parts of the Central United States. It opened my eyes, and it widened my perspective within seconds that how vast time must be, it was unbelievable. When I started reading about Rachel Carson decades later, she had a very similar experience as a kid in Western Pennsylvania, a landlocked part of Pennsylvania, finding a fossilized sea creature and having this immediate sense of time and connection.
There’s scientific fact in all of that, but it was also just something more. It was changing one’s lens and just this shift that you can’t unsee or unfeel. That was a pretty neat, another synchronicity or lucky moment to realize years later that that experience was wonder-filled for others too, especially Rachel Carson.
Finding Connection, Wonder, And Care
As our conversation comes to a close, what is your hope for Springsong Museum? If there is any ask or offer or anything to the listeners who will be hopefully listening to our conversation?
The first ask would be to visit our website. If you have any story about Carson and how her books, her writings affected you, reflections on what it’s like to have your perspective shifted by just reading some words in Rachel’s books, we would love to hear from you. We have, with the New Zealand company Voxpop, set up on our website a way to record your story, and that will be part of our digital collections at the museum. We know people here very locally in Maryland have stories. We know someone who delivered medicine to Rachel near the end of her life on a bike, very personal, very local stories. We’d love those, but we’d also love to hear from anybody, anywhere, that feels that there was something interesting and unique in the experience of reading Carson’s writings.
We need more ideas. We need that constant input of what community needs, and that could be community worldwide, human community. How we transform and shapeshift these messages of ecology into a physical place. Anytime, again, on our website, SpringSongMuseum.org, you can shoot us a comment or question, obviously, but really that input is everything to us. My dreams for this project is, I think you’ve heard about the very specifics around Carson’s message and this feeling of the wonder and the awe, but that really places us and connects us and makes us understand how much we do belong. Also, therefore, that we do have this responsibility almost as family members with other elements in the earth to steward that earth and to have that type of care.
The other thing I would say, for me, it is such an experience to lean into something powerful, creative. I’ve never done that, and it was scary at first to lean into a big idea. I would just encourage that leaning in, especially if it all seems to just make sense and all that is needed is just putting puzzle pieces together. All the pieces often are out there, but Robin Wall Kimmerer talks about mothering beyond one’s own brood and really taking this idea of parenting, or, in her case, she talks about mothering, but just this radical care that we all have the potential for, that we can give to our community. I think that’s needed more than ever, but this is my small way of realizing what my skills could be and how they could be used, and just paying attention to the story that was already here and allowing that to grow and hopefully be born in the next few years.
We all have the potential for radical care that we can give to our community, which is needed more than ever.
It’s very exciting. I can’t wait to see the physical museum when you have it in place. I will definitely come to visit. It’s really remarkable what you’ve been doing and bringing people along and seeding this idea and leaning in, as you said, and just allowing things to emerge. Thank you for being with us.
Thank you so much.
Thank you for having me.
Important Links
- Springsong Museum
- The Silent Spring
- The Sense of Wonder
- Underland: A Deep Time Journey
- Springsong Museum’s Instagram
About Rebecca Henson
A Maryland Master Naturalist & mom to two nature-loving boys, Rebecca most recently worked at Nature Forward’s Woodend Sanctuary and on deforestation-related projects for the nonprofit Ceres.
Previously she spent nearly nine years at Calvert Investments, eventually leading environmental screening and engagement. She serves as Vice President of the board of the Neighbors of the Northwest Branch.
Rebecca has degrees in History from Vanderbilt University and Politics, Policy, and Society, focused on comparative environmental policy, from the University of Bath (UK). She believes deeply in leaning in to wherever it is one lives.