RACHEL CARSON: Witness for Nature.<i> By Linda Lear</i> .<i> Henry Holt: 608 pp., $35</i>

Since her death in 1964, Rachel Carson has become environmentalism’s patron saint. Although her books are no longer at the cutting edge of science and conservation, her life has become the ethical and practical model for environmentalists. Every environmental writer dreams of producing a book like “Silent Spring,” and every activist dreams of changing societal attitudes toward nature as Carson did.

Yet surprisingly little has been written about Carson since her death. Even the best book about her, Paul Brooks’ “The House of Life” (1972) is a soft-focus portrait, combining selected facts and anecdotes with excerpts from her books to create an effect that is as much romantic as biographical. This paucity of biography perpetuated a tendency to perceive her as not quite human, an elfin figure somehow beyond vanity, ambition and pettiness. Carson herself condoned this impression, partly from shyness, partly from an instinct for self-protection. Yet, as her saintly reputation grew, it was inevitable that a real biographer would come along and test it for clay feet. Linda Lear has done exactly that with her exhaustively researched, crisply written “Witness for Nature,” and Carson has passed the test, although not without having her nature sprite mask firmly removed. The Rachel Carson that emerges from Lear’s biography is a very human figure indeed: generous but egotistical, passionate but calculating, gentle but aggressive.

The nature sprite legend falls early. What, for example, was the subject of her first published writing, at age 11? The wildlife around her family’s Pennsylvania farm, right? Wrong. Carson’s first three stories, published in Saint Nicholas Magazine from 1918 to 1919, were about World War I combat. One of these, “A Young Hero,” describes “a lone American soldier holding off a German patrol, killing several of the ‘Huns.’ . . .” And the year before she died, what did Carson buy to celebrate simultaneous honors from three prestigious organizations--the Audubon Society, the National Geographic Society and the American Academy of Arts and Letters? Always fashion-conscious, she treated herself to “a mink jacket with a large collar and full back that flattered her hair and coloring . . . something she had always wanted but never felt she could afford,” as Lear puts it. A friend recalled that “Rachel was terribly pleased with it and ‘looked like a little girl in a party dress.’ ”

War stories and furs don’t detract from the public perception, as is amply confirmed in Lear’s book. Carson was an extraordinarily compassionate, idealistic person, and these details show that she was also tough and shrewd. Carson’s war stories were prize winners, demonstrating a will to use her talents for success at an early age. Writing on popular subjects and wearing pretty clothes may seem incongruous with an unselfish love of nature, but they served her career by pleasing audiences. (What if she had chosen to write about swamps instead of seashores?) Lear makes it clear that Carson’s rise to eminence--first as a best-selling nature writer, then as an almost single-handed reformer of national environmental policy--was no accident.

Carson had a knack not only for finding audiences but also for finding people who could further her career--first science educators like Mary Scott Skinker, then government scientists like Elmer Higgins and then literary figures like agent Marie Rodell and Houghton Mifflin editor Paul Brooks. Far from being a passive beneficiary of such help, Carson knew how to apply pressure to further her interests. According to Lear, she became a scourge of book publicity departments, firing a barrage of promotional ideas at beleaguered staffs and never being satisfied with their performance, although she herself shrank from the drudgery of book signings.

Lear shows just as clearly that Carson had to be exceptionally tough and shrewd to surmount the obstacles she faced. “Witness for Nature” elaborates in daunting detail how much stood in Carson’s way and how little help she got from institutions that are supposed to nurture genius.

Her family posed the earliest, longest-lasting and most damaging obstacles to Carson’s achievements. A weak father failed to provide much example or support, while a strong mother provided what he could not, at the price of a lifelong dependence that increasingly stifled her daughter. Two older siblings provided little but trouble, and Carson was forced to adopt and raise not one but two generations of her sister’s orphaned offspring at her own expense. She never was free of family problems, and they bled the joy from much of her success, as when her 1951 breakthrough into national fame with “The Sea Around Us” coincided with the discovery that an adopted niece was pregnant from an affair with a married man.

Other institutions were less damaging but not much more helpful. When Carson decided to study biology instead of literature at the Pittsburgh College for Women, she made a choice that almost guaranteed neglect by the academic community, despite the encouragement of biology professor Skinker. Carson graduated magna cum laude, but her limited finances truncated graduate work at Johns Hopkins University, where advisors dismissed her as hard-working but “not brilliant,” fit for teaching but not for real scientific work. She had to settle for a master’s degree instead of the doctorate that could have led to higher research or academic jobs. During the Depression, Carson was lucky to find work in the U.S. Bureau of Fisheries, but although hired as a biologist in 1936, she mainly was employed as a writer, editor and research assistant. She edited the field reports of male biologists but got no field assignments of her own until the 1940s, and then as a writer rather than as a scientist.

Carson managed to climb around this professional cul-de-sac by expanding her government writing into a second, part-time career as a science journalist and nature writer, but that was uphill too. Organizations that might have hired someone of her ability, such as the National Audubon Society, apparently were not interested in female writers, and the scientific and literary establishments largely ignored the 1941 publication of her first book, “Under the Sea Wind,” a lyrical description of marine creatures like eels and seabirds. Yet Carson managed to turn apparent limits to advantage by using her government job to accumulate a wealth of new oceanographic knowledge that had come out of World War II research. With the help of agent Rodell and of New Yorker Editor William Shawn, she developed that accumulation into “The Sea Around Us,” a book of such popular appeal and scientific merit that Carson simply could not be ignored anymore.

The unprecedented success of her “profile at sea,” as “The Sea Around Us” was called in its New Yorker serialization, allowed Carson to devote full time to writing, first in developing her flair for lyrical natural history in “The Edge of the Sea,” about North America’s coastlines, then in voicing her concern for the environment in “Silent Spring,” her epoch-making attack on the misuse of chemical pesticides. Carson’s four books did more than any other literary work to change American attitudes toward wild nature. Seen by many as an irrelevant anachronism in the early 1950s, nature had become an object of intense national debate by the 1960s, thanks in part to her work.

Yet fame did not clear the obstacles for Carson. While it offered financial security and increased opportunity, it produced new stresses as universities, conservation groups and other organizations that had overlooked her during the 1940s clamored for her time. Despite Carson’s popularity, Lear notes: “[s]ome reviewers, most of whom were male science writers, were hesitant to give Carson or her book the critical accolades that such a display of learning and eloquence deserved. Their reviews . . . were prejudiced by qualities they held against the author: Carson’s status as a scientist, the audience she addressed, and her gender.” When fame grew after “Silent Spring’s” publication in 1962, it didn’t stop personal attacks from the pesticide industry and government bureaucracies, who called her a poor scientist, a hysterical alarmist, even a communist conspirator. Carson repelled the attacks by producing better arguments than her adversaries (as when, on the widely televised “CBS Reports,” a ranting industry biochemist seemed a mad scientist in contrast to her calm demeanor), but by that time she was dying.

Although athletic in youth, Carson suffered a series of bewilderingly diverse illnesses in maturity. This poor health probably was connected with her stressful personal and professional lives, although the connection is unclear. Lear wisely doesn’t try to psychoanalyze Carson, but she does a good job of showing how her ailments increased as her life grew more emotionally difficult and how she managed to overcome them and continue working right to the end, when she was literally disintegrating from terminal cancer during the writing of “Silent Spring.” What Carson endured before her death of cancer at 56 is painful to read about, but she suffered with a dignity that seems almost superhuman.

Unlovely as they are, the details of Carson’s struggles actually support her saintly image more than the soft-focus legend that she condoned. In fact, Carson’s hard life was archetypally saintly. She had a vocation, performed miracles (what else can her literary and political achievements be called?), suffered martyrdom and left a permanent legacy through her works and example. Lear conveys the last three attributes very well. Unfortunately, she has less success in evoking the first. Saints are distinguished above all by their love of the sacred, but Lear does not convey Carson’s love of the earth, her naturalist vocation, as vividly as she does her social relationships. She repeats Carson’s eloquent statements on the necessary unity of man and nature, but material on Carson’s outdoor experiences seems limited compared to that on her friendships. At one point, Lear writes that Carson acquired “maturity” in “her development from nature writer to social critic and advocate of ecology.”

Yet Carson could not have achieved what she did without the energy she drew from nature, and Lear’s relatively scant material on that side of her life makes the portrait seem incomplete. Perhaps Rachel Carson herself would have been required to tell her naturalist’s story, however. It is a measure of society’s failure that she never had the freedom to write more personally.