Thoughts from Rachel Carson

Rachel Carson

Carson, a renowned nature author and a former marine biologist with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, had grown up with an enthusiasm for nature matched only by her love of writing and poetry. Born in 1907 in Springdale, PA, the youngest of three children, Rachel's interest in all living things in the woods, meadows and stream near her home was encouraged by her mother, Maria McLean Carson, who remained Rachel's strongest supporter throughout her life.
Read more about Rachel here.

thinkers home

If a child is to keep alive his inborn sense of wonder
without any such gift from the fairies, he or she needs
the companionship of at least one adult who can share it,
rediscovering with him or her the joy, excitement,
and mystery of the world we live in.

Those who dwell among the beauties and mysteries
of the Earth are never alone or weary of life.

The control of nature is a phrase conceived in arrogance,
born of the Neanderthal age of biology and the convenience of humans.

We stand now where two roads diverge. But unlike the roads in Robert Frost's
familiar poem, they are not equally fair. The road we have long been traveling
is deceptively easy, a smooth superhighway on which we progress with great speed,
but at its end lies disaster. The other fork of the road -- the one less
traveled by -- offers our last, our only chance to reach a destination
that assures the preservation of the earth.

If I had influence with the good fairy who is supposed
to preside over the christening of all children, I should ask
that her gift to each child in the world be a sense of wonder
so indestructible that it would last throughout life.

For all at last returns to the sea -- to Oceanus,
the ocean river, like the everflowing stream of time,
the beginning and the end.

If facts are the seeds that later produce knowledge
and wisdom, then the emotions and the impressions
of the senses are the fertile soil in which the seeds must grow.

It is a wholesome and necessary thing for us to turn again
to the earth and in the contemplation of her beauties
to know of wonder and humility.

Those who contemplate the beauty of the earth find
reserves of strength that will endure as long as life lasts.

Like the resource it seeks to protect, wildlife
conservation must be dynamic, changing as conditions
change, seeking always to become more effective.

For the sense of smell, almost more than any other,
has the power to recall memories and it is a pity that we use it so little.

The discipline of the writer is to learn to be still
and listen to what his subject has to tell him or her.

The lasting pleasures of contact with the natural world
are not reserved for scientists but are available
to anyone who will place him under the influence
of the earth, sea and sky and their amazing life.

Over increasingly large areas of the United States,
spring now comes unheralded by the return of the birds,
and the early mornings are strangely silent where once
they were filled with the beauty of bird song.

To stand at the edge of the sea, to sense the ebb and flow of the tides,
to feel the breath of a mist moving over a great salt marsh, to watch
the flight of shore birds that have swept up and down the surf lines
of the continents for untold thousands of year, to see the running
of the old eels and the young shad to the sea, is to have knowledge
of things that are as nearly eternal as any earthly life can be.

One way to open your eyes is to ask yourself,
"What if I had never seen this before?
What if I knew I would never see it again?"

The human race is challenged more than ever before
to demonstrate our mastery - not over nature but of ourselves.

It is the public that is being asked to assume the risks...
the public must decide whether it wishes to continue
on the present road and it can only do so
when in full possession of the facts.

In every outthrust headland, in every curving beach,
in every grain of sand there is the story of the earth.

For the first time in the history of the world, every
human being is now subjected to contact with dangerous
chemicals, from the moment of conception until death.

[We are in] an era dominated by industry,
in which the right to make money, at
whatever cost to others, is seldom challenged.

I wanted to make my own mark.