Rachel Carson Quotes & Sayings

Why would anyone believe it is possible to lay down such barrage of poisons on the surface of the earth without making it unfit for all life? They should not be called insecticides, but biocides. — Rachel Carson

Conservation is a cause that has no end. There is no point at which we will say our work is finished. — Rachel Carson

I still feel there is a case to be made for my old belief that as man approaches the 'new heaven and the new earth'
or the space-age universe, if you will, he must do so with humility rather than with arrogance. — Rachel Carson

One summer night, out on a flat headland, all but surrounded by the waters of the bay, the horizons were remote and distant rims on the edge of space. — Rachel Carson

The edge of the sea is a strange and beautiful place. — Rachel Carson

Darling
I suppose the world would consider us absolutely crazy, but it is wonderful to feel that way, isn't it? Sort of a perpetual springtime in our hearts. — Rachel Carson

Along with the possibility of extinction of mankind by nuclear war, the central problem of our age has therefore become the contamination of man's total environment with such substances of incredible potential for harm-substances that accumulate in the tissues of plants and animals and even penetrate the germ cells to shatter or alter the very material of heredity upon which the shape of the future depends. — Rachel Carson

We urgently need an end to these false assurances, to the sugar coating of unpalatable facts. It is the public that is being asked to assume the risks that the insect controllers calculate. The public must decide whether it wishes to continue on the present road, and it can do so only when in full possession of the facts. — Rachel Carson

I like to define biology as the history of the earth and all its life - past, present, and future. To understand biology is to understand that all life is linked to the earth from which it came; it is to understand that the stream of life, flowing out of the dim past into the uncertain future, is in reality a unified force, though composed of an infinite number and variety of separate lives. — Rachel Carson

Every mystery solved brings us to the threshold of a greater one. — Rachel Carson

A rainy day is the perfect time for a walk in the woods. — Rachel Carson

But man is a part of nature, and his war against nature is inevitably a war against himself. — Rachel Carson

Here and there awareness is growing that man, far from being the overlord of all creation, is himself part of nature, subject to the same cosmic forces that control all other life. Man's future welfare and probably even his survival depend upon his learning to live in harmony, rather than in combat, with these forces.
Essay on the Biological Sciences, in: Good Reading (1958) — Rachel Carson

By suggestion and example, I believe children can be helped to hear the many voices about them. Take Time to listen and talk about the voices of the earth and what they mean-the majestic voice of thunder, the winds, the sound of surf or flowing streams. — Rachel Carson

Have we fallen into a mesmerized state that makes us accept as inevitable that which is inferior or detrimental, as though having lost the will or the vision to demand that which is good? — Rachel Carson

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? — Rachel Carson

The real wealth of the Nation lies in the resources of the earth soil, water, forests, minerals, and wildlife. To utilize them for present needs while insuring their preservation for future generations requires a delicately balanced and continuing program, based on the most extensive research. Their administration is not properly, and cannot be, a matter of politics. — Rachel Carson

From a ball of mud taken from a birds plumage, Charles Darwin raised 82 separate plants, belonging to five distinct species! — Rachel Carson

Then the song of a whitethroat, pure and ethereal, with the dreamy quality of remembered joy. — Rachel Carson

Until we have the courage to recognize cruelty for what it is
whether its victim is human or animal
we cannot expect things to be much better in this world. We cannot have peace among men whose hearts delight in killing any living creature. By every act that glorifies or even tolerates such moronic delight in killing, we set back the progress of humanity. — Rachel Carson

....The chemists' ingenuity in devising insecticides has long ago outrun biological knowledge of the way these poisons affect the living organism. — Rachel Carson

We have looked first at man with his vanities and greed and his problems of a day or a year; and then only, and from this biased point of view, we have looked outward at the earth he has inhabited so briefly and at the universe in which our earth is so minute a part. Yet these are the great realities, and against them we see our human problems in a different perspective. Perhaps if we reversed the telescope and looked at man down these long vistas, we should find less time and inclination to plan for our own destruction. — Rachel Carson

Who has the right to decide that the supreme value is a world without insects even though it would be a sterile world ungraced by the curving wing of a bird in flight. The decision is that of the authoritarian temporarily entrusted with power. — Rachel Carson

Science is part of the reality of living; it is the what, the how, and the why of everything in our experience. — Rachel Carson

We cannot have peace among men whose hearts find delight in killing any living creature. — Rachel Carson

Drink in the beauty and wonder at the meaning of what you see. — Rachel Carson

Only within the moment of time represented by the present century has one species
man
acquired significant power to alter the nature of the world. — Rachel Carson

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

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

It is also an era dominated by industry, in which the right to make a dollar at whatever cost is seldom challenged. — Rachel Carson

The wide-ranging birds that visit islands of the ocean in migration may also have a good deal to do with the distribution of plants, and perhaps even of some insects and minute land shells. From a ball of mud taken from a bird's plumage, Charles Darwin raised 82 separate plants, belonging to 5 distinct species! Many plant seeds have hooks or prickles, ideal for attachment to feathers. Such birds as the Pacific golden plover, which annually flies from the mainland of Alaska to the Hawaiian Islands and even beyond, probably figure in many riddles of plant distribution. — Rachel Carson

Only within the 20th Century has biological thought been focused on ecology, or the relation of the living creature to its environment. Awareness of ecological relationships is - or should be - the basis of modern conservation programs, for it is useless to attempt to preserve a living species unless the kind of land or water it requires is also preserved. So delicately interwoven are the relationships that when we disturb one thread of the community fabric we alter it all - perhaps almost imperceptibly, perhaps so drastically that destruction follows. — Rachel Carson

Is it reasonable to suppose that we can apply a broad-spectrum insecticide to kill the burrowing larval stages of a crop-destroying insect ... without also killing the 'good' insects whose function may be the essential one of breaking down organic matter and maintaining healthy soil? — Rachel Carson

Any concept of biology is not only sterile and profitless, it is distorted and untrue, if it puts its primary focus on unnatural conditions rather than on those vast forces not of man's making that shape and channel the nature and direction of life. — Rachel Carson

A child's world is fresh and new and beautiful, full or wonder and excitement. It is our misfortune that for most of us that clear-eyed vision, that true instinct for what is beautiful and awe-inspiring, is dimmed and even lost before we reach adulthood. 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, as an unfailing antidote against the boredom and disenchantment of later year ... the alienation from the sources of our strength. — Rachel Carson

We are accustomed to look for the gross and immediate effects and to ignore all else. Unless this appears promptly and in such obvious form that it cannot be ignored, we deny the existence of hazard. Even research men suffer from the handicap of inadequate methods of detecting the beginnings of injury. The lack of sufficiently delicate methods to detect injury before symptoms appear is one of the great unsolved problems in medicine. — Rachel Carson

Nowhere on the shore is the relation of a creature to its surroundings a matter of a single cause and effect; each living thing is bound to its world by many threads, weaving the intricate design of the fabric of life. — Rachel Carson

By acquiescing in an act that causes such suffering to a living creature, who among us is not diminished? — Rachel Carson

Always the edge of the sea remains an elusive and indefinable boundary. The shore has a dual nature, changing with the swing of the tides, belonging now to the land, now to the sea. — Rachel Carson

The question is whether any civilization can wage relentless war on life without destroying itself, and without losing the right to be called civilized. — Rachel Carson

Beginnings are apt to be shadowy. — Rachel Carson

The years of early childhood are the time to prepare the soil. — Rachel Carson

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

As crude a weapon as the cave man's club, the chemical barrage has been hurled against the fabric of life - a fabric on the one hand delicate and destructible, on the other miraculously tough and resilient, and capable of striking back in unexpected ways. These extraordinary capacities of life have been ignored by the practitioners of chemical control who have brought to their task no "high-minded orientation," no humility before the vast forces with which they tamper. — Rachel Carson

In nature nothing exists alone. — Rachel Carson

There is certainly no single remedy for this condition and I am offering no panacea. But it seems reasonable to believe - and I do believe - that 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 the destruction of our race. Wonder and humility are wholesome emotions, and they do not exist side by side with a lust for destruction. — Rachel Carson

This is an era of specialists, each of whom sees his own problem and is unaware of or intolerant of the larger frame into which it fits. — Rachel Carson

To have risked so much in our efforts to mold nature to our satisfaction and yet to have failed in achieving our goal would indeed by the final irony. Yet this, it seems, is our situation. — Rachel Carson

If, having endured much, we have at last asserted out "right to know," and if by knowing, we have concluded that we are being asked to take senseless and frightening risks, then we should no longer accept the counsel of those who tell us that we must fill our world with poisonous chemicals; we should look about and see what other course is open to us. — Rachel Carson

But most of all I shall remember the monarchs, that unhurried westward drift of one small winged form after another, each drawn by some invisible force. — Rachel Carson

The ultimate work of energy production is accomplished not in any specialized organ but in every cell of the body. A living cell, like a flame, burns fuel to produce the energy on which life depends. The analogy is more poetic than precise, for the cell accomplishes its 'burning' with only the moderate heat of the body's normal temperature. Yet all these billions of gently burning little fires spark the energy of life. Should they cease to burn, 'no heart could beat, no plant could grow upward defying gravity, no amoeba could swim, no sensation could speed along a nerve, no thought could flash in the human brain,' said the chemist Eugene Rabinowitch. — Rachel Carson

The shore is an ancient world, for as long as there has been an earth and sea there has been this place of the meeting of land and water. — Rachel Carson

Short version: For the child ... , it is not half so important to know as to feel. 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 more important to pave the way for a child to want to know than to put him on a diet of facts that he is not ready to assimilate. — Rachel Carson

The most alarming of all man's assaults upon the environment is the contamination of air, earth, rivers, and sea with dangerous and even lethal materials. This pollution is for the most part irrecoverable; the chain of evil it initiates not only in the world that must support life but in living tissues is for the most part irreversible. In this now universal contamination of the environment, chemicals are the sinister and little-recognized partners of radiation in changing the very nature of the world-the very nature of its life. — Rachel Carson

The discipline of the writer is to learn to be still and listen to what his subject has to tell him. — Rachel Carson

All this has come about because of the sudden rise and prodigious growth of an industry for the production of man-made or synthetic chemicals with insecticidal properties. This industry is a child of the Second World War. In the course of developing agents of chemical warfare, some of the chemicals created in the laboratory were found to be lethal to insects. The discovery did not come by chance: insects were widely used to test chemicals as agents of death for man. — Rachel Carson

Now I truly believe that we in this generation must come to terms with nature, and I think we're challenged, as mankind has never been challenged before, to prove our maturity and our mastery, not of nature but of ourselves. — Rachel Carson

For mankind as a whole, a possession infinitely more valuable than individual life is our genetic heritage, our link with past and future ... Yet genetic deterioration through man-made agents is the menace of our time ... — Rachel Carson

And so in my mind's eye these coastal forms merge and blend in a shifting, kaleidoscopic pattern in which there is no finality, no ultimate and fixed reality - earth becoming fluid as the sea itself. — Rachel Carson

For all at last return to the sea- to Oceanus, the ocean river, like the ever-flowing stream of time, the beginning and the end. — Rachel Carson

Beginnings are apt to be shadowy and so it is the beginnings of the great mother life, the sea. — Rachel Carson

I believe natural beauty has a necessary place in the spiritual development of any individual or any society. I believe that whenever we substitute something man-made and artificial for a natural feature of the earth, we have retarded some part of man's spiritual growth. — Rachel Carson

In the fish world many things are told by sound waves. — Rachel Carson

For the sense of smell, almost more than any other, has the power to recall memories and it's a pity we use it so little. — Rachel Carson

A Who's Who of pesticides is therefore of concern to us all. If we are going to live so intimately with these chemicals eating and drinking them, taking them into the very marrow of our bones - we had better know something about their nature and their power. — Rachel Carson

The sea is a place of mystery. One by one, the mysteries of yesterday have been solved. But the solution seems always to bring with it another, perhaps a deeper mystery. I doubt that the last, final mysteries of the sea will ever be resolved. In fact, I cherish a very unscientific hope that they will not be. — Rachel Carson

In an age when man has forgotten his origins and is blind even to his most essential needs for survival, water along with other resources has become the victim of his indifference. — Rachel Carson

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

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 years, 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. — 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 balckness of mile-deep water. — Rachel Carson

The beauty of the living world I was trying to save has always been uppermost in my mind - that, and anger at the senseless, brutish things that were being done ... Now I can believe I have at least helped a little. — Rachel Carson

To the bird watcher, the suburbanite who derives joy from birds in his garden, the hunter, the fisherman or the explorer of wild regions, anything that destroys the wildlife of an area for even a single year has deprived him of pleasure to which he has a legitimate right. — Rachel Carson

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. — Rachel Carson

When the public protests. confronted with some obvious evidence of damaging results of pesticide applications, it is fed little tranquilizers pills of half truth. — Rachel Carson

It is not my contention that chemical insecticides must never be used. I do contend that we have put poisonous and biologically potent chemicals indiscriminately into the hands of persons largely or wholly ignorant of their potentials for harm. We have subjected enormous numbers of people to contact with these poisons, without their consent and often without their knowledge. — Rachel Carson

There is no drop of water in the ocean, not even in the deepest parts of the abyss, that does not know and respond to the mysterious forces that create the tide. — Rachel Carson

Natural beauty has a necessary place in the spiritual development of any individual or any society. — Rachel Carson

Nature reserves some of her choice rewards for days when her mood may appear to be somber. — Rachel Carson

The aim of science is to discover and illuminate truth. And that, I take it, is the aim of literature, whether biography or history ... It seems to me, then, that there can be no separate literature of science. — Rachel Carson

Autumn comes to the sea with a fresh blaze of phosphorescence, when every wave crest is aflame. Here and there the whole surface may glow with sheets of cold fire, while below schools of fish pour through the water like molten metal. — Rachel Carson

When we go down to the low-tide line, we enter a world that is as old as the earth itself - the primeval meeting place of the elements of earth and water, a place of compromise and conflit and eternal change. — Rachel Carson

Many children ... delight in the small and inconspicuous. — Rachel Carson

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. — Rachel Carson

The procedure has a strange Alice-in-Wonderland quality. The reservoir was created as a public water supply, yet the community, probably unconsulted about the sportsmen's project, is forced either to drink water containing poisonous residues or to pay our tax money for treatment of the water to remove the poisons - treatments that are by no means foolproof. — Rachel Carson

The Choice, after all, is ours to make. — Rachel Carson

We live in a scientific age, yet we assume that knowledge of science is the prerogative of only a small number of human beings, isolated and priestlike in their laboratories. This is not true. The materials of science are the materials of life itself. Science is part of the reality of living; it is the way, the how and the why for everything in our experience. — Rachel Carson

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. — Rachel Carson

The 'control of nature' is a phrase conceived in arrogance, born of the Neanderthal age of biology and philosophy, when it was supposed that nature exists for the convenience of man. — Rachel Carson

The responsibility of science, and the limits of technological progress. — Rachel Carson

The more I learned about the use of pesticides, the more appalled I became. I realized that here was the material for a book. What I discovered was that everything which meant most to me as a naturalist was being threatened, and that nothing I could do would be more important. — Rachel Carson

Only as a child's awareness and reverence for the wholeness of life are developed can his humanity to his own kind reach its full development. — Rachel Carson

If a child is to keep alive his inborn sense of wonder, he needs the companionship of at least one adult who can share it, rediscovering with him the joy, excitement, and mystery of the world we live in. — Rachel Carson

Carson's thesis that we were subjecting ourselves to slow poisoning by the misuse of chemical pesticides that polluted the environment may seem like common currency now, but in 1962 Silent Spring contained the kernel of social revolution. — Rachel Carson

Those who dwell, as scientists or laymen, among the beauties and mysteries of the earth, are never alone or weary of life. — Rachel Carson

To understand the living present, and the promise of the future, it is necessary to remember the past. — Rachel Carson

It is ironic to think that man might determine his own future by something so seemingly trivial as the choice of an insect spray. — Rachel Carson

We still talk in terms of conquest. We still haven't become mature enough to think of ourselves as only a tiny part of a vast and incredible universe. — Rachel Carson

We have been troubled about the world, and had almost lost faith in man; it helps to think about the long history of the earth, and of how life came to be. And when we think in terms of millions of years, we are not so impatient that our own problems be solved tomorrow. — Rachel Carson

The next time you stand on a beach at night, watching the moon's bright path across the water, and the conscious of the moon-drawn tides, remember that the moon itself may have been born of a great tidal wave of earthly substance, torn off into space. And remember if the moon was formed in this fashion, the event may have had much to do with shaping the ocean basins and the continents as we know them. — Rachel Carson

Eventually man, too, found his way back to the sea. Standing on its shores, he must have looked out upon it with wonder and curiosity, compounded with an unconscious recognition of his lineage. He could not physically re-enter the ocean as the seals and whales had done. But over the centuries, with all the skill and ingenuity and reasoning powers of his mind, he has sought to explore and investigate even its most remote parts, so that he might re-enter it mentally and imaginatively. — Rachel Carson