Quotes from Rachel Carson

Given the initial talent … writing is largely a matter of application and hard work, of writing and rewriting endlessly, until you are satisfied that you have said what you want to say as clearly and simply as possible. For me, that usually means many, many revisions.

The sea is blue because the sunlight is reflected back to our eyes from the water molecules or from very minute particles suspended in the sea. In the journey of the light rays downward into the water and back to our eyes, all the red rays of the spectrum and most of the yellow have been absorbed, so it is chiefly the cool, blue light that we see.

For time is the essential ingredient; but in the modern world there is no time. The rapidity of change and the speed with which new situations are created follow the impetuous and heedless pace of man rather than the deliberate pace of nature.

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

Whatever the vexations or concerns of their personal lives, their thoughts can find paths that lead to inner contentment and to renewed excitement in living. Those who contemplate the beauty of the earth find reserves of strength that will endure as long as life lasts. There is symbolic as well as actual beauty in the migration of the birds, the ebb and flow of the tides, the folded bud ready for the spring.

Most of us walk unseeing through the world, unaware alike of its beauties, its wonders, and the strange and sometimes terrible intensity of the lives that are being lived about us.

They should not be called 'insecticides', but 'biocides'.

The question of chemical residues on the food we eat is a hotly debated issue. The existence of such residues is either played down by the industry as unimportant or is flatly denied. Simultaneously, there is a strong tendency to brand as fanatics or cultists all who are so perverse as to demand that their food be free of insect poisons. In all this cloud of controversy, what are the actual facts?

To the bird watcher, the suburbanite who derives joy from birds in his garden, the hunter, the fisherman or the explorer of wild regions, anything that destroys the wildlife of an area for even a single year has deprived him of pleasure to which he has a legitimate right.

It is only within the moment of time represented by the twentieth century that one species - man - has acquired significant power to alter the nature of his world, and it is only within the past twenty-five years that his power has achieved such magnitude that it endangers the whole earth and its life. The most alarming of all man's assaults upon the environment is the contamination of the air, earth, rivers, and seas with dangerous, and even lethal, materials.

Only within the moment of time represented by the present century has one species—man—acquired significant power to alter the nature of his world.

From a ball of mud taken from a birds plumage, Charles Darwin raised 82 separate plants, belonging to five distinct species!

Although man's record as a steward of the natural resources of the earth has been a discouraging one, there has long been a certain comfort in the belief that the sea, at least, was inviolate, beyond man's ability to change and to despoil. But this belief, unfortunately, has proved to be naïve.

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

The control of nature is a phrase conceived in arrogance, born of the Neanderthal age of biology and philosophy, when it was supposed that nature exists for the convenience of man.

Carson's writing initiated a transformation in the relationship between humans and the natural world and stirred an awakening of public environmental consciousness. It

If I had influence with the good fairy who is supposed to preside over the christening of all children, I should ask that her gift to each child in the world be a sense of wonder so indestructible that it would last throughout life, as an unfailing antidote against the boredom and disenchantment of later years … the alienation from the sources of our strength.

What sets the new synthetic insecticides is their enormous biological potency.

The chemists' ingenuity in devising insecticides has long ago outrun biological knowledge of the way these poisons affect the living organism.

As soon as the earth's crust cooled enough, the rains began to fall. Never have there been such rains since that time. They fell continuously, day and night, days passing into months, into years, into centuries. They poured into the waiting ocean basins, or, falling upon the continental masses, drained away to become sea.

We are rightly appalled by the genetic effects of radiation; how then, can we be indifferent to the same effect in chemicals that we disseminate widely in our environment?

For the first time in the history of the world, every human being is now subjected to contact with dangerous chemicals, from the moment of conception until death.

For mankind as a whole, a possession infinitely more valuable than individual life is our genetic heritage, our link with past and future.

I]t is simply impossible to predict the effects of lifetime exposure to chemical and physical agents that are not part of the biological experience of man.