Erich Hartmann/Magnum Photos
Rachel Carson
May 27, 1907 – April 14, 1964
The spiral shells of other snails—these quite minute—left winding tracks on the mud as they moved about in search of food. They were born shells, and when I saw them I had a nostalgic moment when I wished I might see what Audubon saw, a century and more ago. For such little horn shells were the food of the flamingo, once so numerous on this coast, and when I half closed my eyes I could almost imagine a flock of these magnificent flame birds feeding in that cove, filling it with their color. It was a mere yesterday in the life of the earth that they were there; in nature, time and space are relative matters.
The Edge of the Sea, Rachel Carson.
With these surface waters, through a series of delicately adjusted, interlocking relationship, the life of all parts of the sea is linked. What happens to a diatom in the upper, sunlit strata of the sea may well determine what happens to a cod lying on a ledge of some rocky canyon a hundred fathoms below, or to a bed of multicolored, gorgeously plumed seaworms carpeting an underlying shoal. or to a prawn creeping over the soft oozes of the sea floor in the blackness of mile-deep water.
The Sea Around Us, Rachel Carson.
An experience like that, when one’s thoughts are released to roam through the lonely spaces of the universe, can be shared… even if you don’t know the name of a single star. You can still drink in the beauty, and think and wonder at the meaning of what you see.
The Sense of Wonder, Rachel Carson.
The winds, the sea, and the moving tides are what they are. If there is wonder and beauty and majesty in them, science will discover these qualities. If they are not there, science cannot create them. If there is poetry in my book about the sea, it is not because I deliberately put it there, but because no one could write truthfully about the sea and leave out the poetry.
Under the Sea Wind, Rachel Carson.
Saint Rachel, “the nun of nature, ” as she is called, is frequently invoked in the name of one environmental cause or another, but few know much about her life and work. “People think she came out of nowhere to deliver this Jeremiad of ‘Silent Spring, ’ but she had three massive best sellers about the sea before that, ” McKibben says. “She was Jacques Cousteau before there was Jacques Cousteau.” …. Carson believed that people would protect only what they loved, so she worked to establish a “sense of wonder” about nature… to articulate sophisticated ideas about the inner workings of largely unseen things.
“She wanted us to understand that we were just a blip, ” says Linda Lear, author of Carson’s definitive biography, “Witness for Nature.” “The control of nature was an arrogant idea, and Carson was against human arrogance.”… “Silent Spring” was more than a study of the effects of synthetic pesticides; it was an indictment of the late 1950s. Humans, Carson argued, should not seek to dominate nature through chemistry, in the name of progress.