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The question is whether any civilization can wage relentless war on life without destroying itself, and without losing the right to be called civilized.

Rachel Carson

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Rachel Carson
Age: 56 †
Born: 1907
Born: May 27
Died: 1964
Died: April 14
Author
Conservationist
Environmentalist
Essayist
Marine Biologist
Non-Fiction Writer
Zoologist
Rachel Carson House
Rachel Louise Carson
Rachel L. Carson
Without
Destroying
Right
Civilized
Life
Losing
Civilization
Question
Called
Relentless
Whether
Conservation
War
Wage

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Even in the vast and mysterious reaches of the sea we are brought back to the fundamental truth that nothing lives to itself.
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Always the edge of the sea remains an elusive and indefinable boundary. The shore has a dual nature, changing with the swing of the tides, belonging now to the land, now to the sea.
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Nothing is wasted in the sea every particle of material is used over and over again, first by one creature, then by another. And when in spring the waters are deeply stirred, the warm bottom water brings to the surface a rich supply of minerals, ready for use by new forms of life.
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To understand the living present, and the promise of the future, it is necessary to remember the past.
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For mankind as a whole, a possession infinitely more valuable than individual life is our genetic heritage, our link with past and future... Yet genetic deterioration through man-made agents is the menace of our time.
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[Writing is] largely a matter of application and hard work, or 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.
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I still feel there is a case to be made for my old belief that as man approaches the 'new heaven and the new earth' -- or the space-age universe, if you will, he must do so with humility rather than with arrogance.
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Knowing what I do, there would be no future peace for me if I kept silent.
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This is an era of specialists, each of whom sees his own problem and is unaware of or intolerant of the larger frame into which it fits.
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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. This is a valid point of view.
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We urgently need an end to these false assurances, to the sugar coating of unpalatable facts. It is the public that is being asked to assume the risks that the insect controllers calculate. The public must decide whether it wishes to continue on the present road, and it can do so only when in full possession of the facts.
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We are not truly civilized if we concern ourselves only with the relation of man to man. What is important is the relation of man to all life.
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Any concept of biology is not only sterile and profitless, it is distorted and untrue, if it puts its primary focus on unnatural conditions rather than on those vast forces not of man's making that shape and channel the nature and direction of life.
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Beginnings are apt to be shadowy.
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Those who love and free nature are never alone.
Rachel Carson
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In its mysterious past it encompasses all the dim origins of life and receives in the end, after, it may be, many transmutations, the dead husks of that same life. For all at last return to the sea - to Oceanus, the ocean river, like the ever-flowing stream of time, the beginning and the end.
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Conservation is a cause that has no end. There is no point at which we will say our work is finished.
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Like the resource it seeks to protect, wildlife conservation must be dynamic, changing as conditions change, seeking always to become more effective.
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When we go down to the low-tide line, we enter a world that is as old as the earth itself - the primeval meeting place of the elements of earth and water, a place of compromise and conflit and eternal change.
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Science is part of the reality of living it is the what, the how, and the why of everything in our experience.
Rachel Carson