Rachel Carson Quotes
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The ocean is a place of paradoxes. It is the home of the great white shark, two-thousand-pound killer of the seas, and of the hundred-foot blue whale, the largest animal that ever lived. It is also the home of living things so small that your two hands might scoop up as many of them as there are stars in the Milky Way.
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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.
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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.
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As crude a weapon as a cave man's club, the chemical barrage has been hurled against the fabric of life.
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It is ironic to think that man might determine his own future by something so seemingly trivial as the choice of an insect spray.
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I sincerely believe that for the child, and for the parent seeking to guide him, it is not half so important to 'know' as to 'feel'.
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The Choice, after all, is ours to make.
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The question is whether any civilization can wage relentless war on life without destroying itself, and without losing the right to be called civilized.
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When any living thing has come to the end of its cycle, we accept that end as natural. When that intangible cycle has run its course it is a natural and not unhappy thing that a life comes to its end.
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Beginnings are apt to be shadowy.
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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.
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A child's world is fresh and new and beautiful, full of wonder and excitement.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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A child's world is fresh and new and beautiful, full of wonder and excitement. It is our misfortune that for most of us that clear-eyed vision, that true instinct for what is beautiful, is dimmed and even lost before we reach adulthood.
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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?
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To understand the living present, and the promise of the future, it is necessary to remember the past.
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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.
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Play, Incorporating Animistic and Magical Thinking Is Important Because It:
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Those who contemplate the beauty of the earth find reserves of strength that will endure as long as life lasts.
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The aim of science is to discover and illuminate truth. And that, I take it, is the aim of literature, whether biography or history or fiction. It seems to me, then, that there can be no separate literature of science.
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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.