Rachel Carson Quotes
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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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There is one quality that characterizes all of us who deal with the sciences of the earth and its life - we are never bored.
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I like to define biology as the history of the earth and all its life - past, present, and future.
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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.
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The real wealth of the Nation lies in the resources of the earth - soil, water, forests, minerals, and wildlife.
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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.
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Knowing what I do, there would be no future peace for me if I kept silent.
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The years of early childhood are the time to prepare the soil.
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Nothing is wasted in the sea; every particle of material is used over and over again, first by one creature, then by another. And when in spring the waters are deeply stirred, the warm bottom water brings to the surface a rich supply of minerals, ready for use by new forms of life.
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Wonder and humility are wholesome emotions and they do not exist side by side with a lust for destruction.
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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 destruction.
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We cannot have peace among men whose hearts find delight in killing any living creature.
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Our attitude towards plants is a singularly narrow one. If we see any immediate utility in a plant we foster it. If for any reason we find its presence undesirable or merely a matter of indifference, we may condemn it to destruction forthwith.
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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. This is a valid point of view.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Even in the vast and mysterious reaches of the sea we are brought back to the fundamental truth that nothing lives to itself.
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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.
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The edge of the sea is a strange and beautiful place.
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Like the resource it seeks to protect, wildlife conservation must be dynamic, changing as conditions change, seeking always to become more effective.
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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.
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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.
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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.