Rachel Carson Quotes

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.

I believe natural beauty has a necessary place in the spiritual development of any individual or any society. I believe that whenever we destroy beauty, or 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.

I believe this affinity of the human spirit for the earth and its beauties is deeply and logically rooted. As human beings, we are part of the whole stream of life. We have been human beings for perhaps a million years. But life itself — passes on something of itself to other life — that mysterious entity that moves and is aware of itself and its surroundings, and so is distinguished from rocks or senseless clay — [from which] life arose many hundreds of millions of years ago. Since then it has developed, struggled, adapted itself to its surroundings, evolved an infinite number of forms. But its living protoplasm is built of the same elements as air, water, and rock. To these the mysterious spark of life was added. Our origins are of the earth. And so there is in us a deeply seated response to the natural universe, which is part of our humanity.

Between low water and the flotsam and jetsam of the high-tide mark, land and sea wage a never-ending conflict for possession.

It is spread before us like the pages of an open book in which we can read why the land is what it is, and why we should preserve its integrity. But the pages lie unread.

It was written, moreover, out of the deep conviction that the life of the sea is worth knowing. To stand at the edge of the sea, to sense the ebb and the 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 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. These things were before ever man stood on the shore of the ocean and looked out upon it with wonder; they continue year in, year out, through the centuries and the ages, while man's kingdoms rise and fall.

What if I had never seen this before? What if I knew I would never see it again?

Poets often have a perception that gives their words the validity of science. So the English poet Francis Thompson said nearly a century ago, ‘Thou canst not stir a flower/Without troubling of a star.’ But the poet's insight has not become part of general knowledge.

The earth's vegetation is part of a web of life in which there are intimate and essential relations between plants the the earth, between plants and other plants, between plants and animals. Sometimes we have no choice but to disturb these relationships, but we should do so thoughtfully, with full awareness that what we do may have consequences remote in time and place.

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.

It was clear to the industry that Rachel Carson was a hysterical woman whose alarming view of the future could be ignored or, if necessary, suppressed. She was a “bird and bunny lover,” a woman who kept cats and was therefore clearly suspect.

"These sprays, dusts, and aerosols are now applied almost universally to farms, gardens, forests, and homes - nonselective chemicals that have the power to kill every insect, the "good" and the "bad", to still the song of birds and the leaping of fish in the streams, to coat the leaves with a deadly film, and to linger on in soil - all this though the intended target may be only a few weeds or insects. Can anyone believe it is possible to lay down such a barrage of poisons on the surface of the earth with out making it unfit for all life? They should not be called "insecticides", but "biocides"."

In the lowest pools the Laminarias begin to appear, called variously the oarweeds, devil’s aprons, sea tangles, and kelps. The Laminarias belong to the brown algae, which flourish in the dimness of deep waters and polar seas. The horsetail kelp lives below the tidal zone with others of the group, but in deep pools also comes over the threshold, just above the line of the lowest tides. [...] To look into such a pool is to behold a dark forest, it’s foliage like the leaves of palm trees, the heavy stalks of the kelps also curiously like the trunks of palms. [...] One of these laminarian holdfasts is something like the roots of a forest tree, branching out, dividing, subdividing, in its very complexity a measure of the great seas that roar over this plant.

On the other hand, those who are willing to wait for an extra season other two for full results (against an Japanese beetle) will turn to milky disease; they will be rewarded with lasting control that become more, rather than less effective with the passage of time.

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

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