Rachel Carson Quotes

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 our alarming misfortune that so primitive a science has armed itself with the most modern and terrible weapons

Such poisoning of waters set aside for conservation purposes could have consequences felt by every western duck hunter and by everyone to whom the sight and sound of drifting ribbons of waterfowl across an evening sky are precious.

It is a curious situation that the sea, from which life first arose, should now be threatened by the activities of one form of that life. But the sea, though changed in a sinister way, will continue to exist; the threat is rather to life itself.

Every grain of sand or silt carried out by the rivers and deposited at sea displaces a corresponding amount of water.

By acquiescing in an act that can cause such suffering to a living creature, who among us is not diminished as a human being.

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

Ino 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.

But man, unhappily, has written one of his blackest records as a destroyer on the oceanic islands. He has seldom set foot on an island that he has not brought about disastrous changes. He has destroyed environments by cutting, clearing, and burning; he has brought with him as a chance associate the nefarious rat; and almost invariably he has turned loose upon the islands a whole Noah’s Ark of goats, hogs, cattle, dogs, cats, and other non-native animals as well as plants. Upon species after species of island life, the black night of extinction has fallen.

Man's attitude toward nature is today critically important simply because we have now acquired a fateful power to alter and destroy nature. But man is a part of nature, and his war against nature is inevitably a war against himself? [We are] challenged as mankind has never been challenged before to prove our maturity and our mastery, not of nature, but of ourselves.

The chemical war is never won, and all life is caught in its crossfire.

How could intel igent beings seek to control a few unwanted species by a method that contaminated the entire environment and brought the threat of disease and death even to their own kind?

[…] can we afford to ignore the fact that we are now filling the environment with chemicals that have the power to strike directly at the chromosomes […]? Is this not too high a price to pay for a sproutless potato or a mosquitoless patio?

For mankind as a whole, a possession infinitely more valuable than individual life is our genetic heritage, our link with past and future. Shaped through long eons of evolution, our genes not only make us what we are, but hold in their minute beings the future — be it one of promise or threat.

The obligation to endure gives us the right to know.