"I can remember no time when I wasn't interested in . . . the whole world of nature," biologist Rachel Carson once noted, and her long career dedicated to studying the environment indeed testified to the truth of that statement. Carson was not just a scientist; she was an artist, and her often lyrical books on nature, such as The Sea Around Us, were valued for both their scientific and literary merits. Probably her most important book was The Silent Spring, published in 1962. Both a description of nature's wonders and a warning of the great harm that chemical pollutants were visiting upon them, this work created a new public consciousness of the environment's fragility and helped to turn concern for ecology into a mass movement.

The British-born sculptor Una Hanbury met Carson at an Audubon Society dinner just before Carson's death. Hanbury was quite struck by Carson's great vitality, and in modeling this posthumous bust, she especially wanted to make that vitality come through.