It is our alarming misfortune that so primitive a science has armed itself with the most modern and terrible weapons - Rachel Carson

Our streams are fouled with an incredible assortment of wastes-domestic, chemical, radioactive, so that our planet, though dominated by seas that envelop three-fourths of its surface, is rapidly becoming a thirsty world.

Given time — time not in years but in millennia — life adjusts, and a balance has been reached. For time is the essential ingredient; but in the modern world there is no time.

The pleasures, the values of contact with the natural world, are not reserved for the scientists. They are available to anyone who will place himself under the influence of a lonely mountain top-or the sea-or the stillness of a forest; or who will stop to think about so small a thing as the mystery of a growing seed.