It is not my contention that chemical insecticides must never be used. I do contend that we have put poisonous and biologically potent chemicals indi… - Rachel Carson

I clearly remember that in the days before Hiroshima I used to wonder whether nature-nature in the broadest context of the word-actually needed protection from man. Surely the sea was inviolate and forever beyond man's power to change it. Surely the vast cycles by which water is drawn up into the clouds to return again to the earth could never be touched. And just as surely the vast tides of life-the migrating birds-would continue to ebb and flow over the continents, marking the passage of the seasons. But I was wrong. Even these things, that seemed to belong to the eternal verities, are not only threatened but have already felt the destroying hand of man.

"Such plants are "weeds" only to those who make a business of selling and applying chemicals."

Los peces, los anfibios y los reptiles por un lado y las aves y los mamíferos de sangre caliente por otro, y cada uno de nosotros, llevamos en nuestras venas la corriente salina de nuestra sangre, en la cual el sodio, el potasio y el calcio se hallan en proporciones muy semejantes a las que existen en el agua del mar. Ésta es nuestra herencia desde el día, hace un número incalculable de millones de años, en que un remoto antecesor pasó de la etapa unicelular a la pluricelular y adquirió por vez primera un sistema circulatorio, en el interior del cual corría un fluido casi idéntico al agua del mar.