As you listen to the present controversy about pesticides, I recommend that you ask yourself-Who speaks? And Why? - Rachel Carson

Life is a miracle beyond our comprehension, and we should reverence it even where we have to struggle against it. . . .

We stand now where two roads diverge. But unlike the roads in Robert Frost's familiar poem, they are not equally fair. The road we have long been traveling is deceptively easy, a smooth superhighway on which we progress with great speed, but at its end lies disaster. The other fork of the road-the one "less traveled by"-offers our last, our only chance to reach a destination that assures the preservation of our earth. The choice, after all, is ours to make.

It soon became evident that there was no single animal — bird, fish, mammal, or any of the sea's lesser creatures — that could live in all the various parts of the sea I proposed to describe. That problem was instantly solved, however, when I realised that the sea itself must be the central character whether I wished it or not; for the sense of the sea, holding the power of life and death over every one of its creatures from the smallest to the largest, would inevitably pervade every page.