Extended excerpt: [Non-fiction]

“The current vogue for poisons has failed utterly to take into account these most fundamental considerations. As crude a weapon as the cave man’s club, the chemical barrage has been hurled against the fabric of life – a fabric on the one hand delicate and destructible, on the other miraculously tough and resilient, and capable of striking back in unexpected ways.” (p. 348) 

Source: Silent Spring (1962 |2002 Mariner edition) International Standard Book Number (ISBN) 0-618-25305-X

Extended excerpt  [Acceptance speech]:

“The winds, the sea, and the moving tides are what they are. If there is wonder and beauty and majesty in them, science will discover these qualities. If they are not there, science cannot create them. If there is poetry in my book about the sea, it is not because I deliberately put it there, but because no one could write truthfully about the sea and leave out the poetry.”

Source link: “Rachel Carson, Winner of the 1952 Nonfiction Award for The Sea Around Us” (1952) National Book Foundation: http://www.nationalbook.org/nbaacceptspeech_rcarson.html#.V0ys1pMrKek

Extended excerpt  [Letter to the editor of the Washington Post newspaper. Carson was responding to the dismissal of several key U.S. federal environmental officials who were being replaced by political appointees. Albert M. Day, director of the Fish & Wildlife Service, was one of the scientists who were fired. Douglas McKay, an automotive dealer & former Governor of Oregon, dismissed Day & other scientists after his appointment to Secretary of the Interior.]:

“For many years public-spirited citizens throughout the country have been working for the conservation of the natural resources, realizing their vital importance to the Nation. Apparently their hard-won progress is to be wiped out, as a politically minded Administration returns us to the dark ages of unrestrained exploitation and destruction.

It is one of the ironies of our time that, while concentrating on the defense of our country against enemies from without, we should be so heedless of those who would destroy it from within.” (p. 14, column 2 of letter)

Source note: Carson’s letter was reprinted in the August 1953 Reader’s Digest magazine, and in Lost Woods: The Discovered Writing of Rachel Carson (1998, ed. Linda Lear).

Source link: “Mr. Day’s Dismissal” (22 April 1953) The Washington Post; online via ProQuest Archiver [subscription service]: https://secure.pqarchiver.com/washingtonpost_historical/doc/152567272.html?FMT=AI

Extended excerpt  [Acceptance speech. Carson was awarded the John Burroughs Medal for Natural History Writing for her book, The Sea Around Us.]:

“There is certainly no single remedy for this condition and I am offering no panacea. But it seems reasonable to believe – and I do believe – that the more clearly we can focus our attention on the wonder and realities of the universe about us the less taste we shall have for the destruction of our race. Wonder and humility are wholesome emotions, and they do not exist side by side with a lust for destruction.” (p. 152)

Source link: Library – Lost Woods: The Discovered Writing of Rachel Carson (1999) online via Open Library [free subscription service]: https://archive.org/stream/lostwoodsdiscove00cars#page/152/mode/1up/search/wonder+and+humility

Extended excerpt  [Acceptance speech]:

“The winds, the sea, and the moving tides are what they are. If there is wonder and beauty and majesty in them, science will discover these qualities. If they are not there, science cannot create them. If there is poetry in my book about the sea, it is not because I deliberately put it there, but because no one could write truthfully about the sea and leave out the poetry.”

Source link: “Rachel Carson, Winner of the 1952 Nonfiction Award for The Sea Around Us” (1952) National Book Foundation: http://www.nationalbook.org/nbaacceptspeech_rcarson.html#.V0ys1pMrKek

Extended excerpt  [Non-fiction. First lines of Chapter 8: “And No Birds Sing”]:

“Over increasingly large areas of the United States, spring now comes unheralded by the return of the birds, and the early mornings are strangely silent where once they were filled with the beauty of bird song. This sudden silencing of the song of birds, this obliteration of the color and beauty and interest they lend to our world have come about swiftly, insidiously, and unnoticed by those whose communities are as yet unaffected.” (p. 103)

Source: Silent Spring (1962 |2002 Mariner edition) International Standard Book Number (ISBN) 0-618-25305-X

Extended excerpt  [Non-fiction]:

“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. The concepts and practices of applied entomology for the most part date from the Stone Age of science. It is our alarming misfortune that so primitive a science has armed itself with the most modern and terrible weapons, and that in turning them against the insects it has also turned them against the earth.” (p. 348)

Source: Silent Spring (1962 |2002 Mariner edition) International Standard Book Number (ISBN) 0-618-25305-X

Extended excerpt  [Letter to the editor of the Washington Post newspaper. Carson was responding to the dismissal of several key U.S. federal environmental officials who were being replaced by political appointees. Albert M. Day, a biologist & director of the Fish & Wildlife Service, was one of the scientists who were fired. Secretary McKay.]:

“The real wealth of the Nation lies in the resources of the earth – soil, water, forests, minerals, and wildlife. To utilize them for present needs while insuring their preservation for future generations requires a delicately balanced and continuing program, based on the most extensive research. Their administration is not properly, and cannot be, a matter of politics.” (p. 14, column 1 of letter)

Source link: “Mr. Day’s Dismissal” (22 April 1953) The Washington Post; online via ProQuest Archiver [subscription service]: https://secure.pqarchiver.com/washingtonpost_historical/doc/152567272.html?FMT=AI

Extended excerpt [From Carson’s speech to Sorority of Women Journalists, Theta Sigma Phi, on “her experiences as a woman writer.”]:

“In contemplating “the exceeding beauty of the earth” these people have found calmness and courage. For there is symbolic as well as actual beauty in the migration of birds; in the ebb and flow of the tides; in the folded bud ready for the spring. There is something infinitely healing in these repeated refrains of nature – the assurance that dawn comes after night, and spring after winter.” (pp. 250-251)

Source link: Library – Lost Woods: The Discovered Writing of Rachel Carson (1999) online via Open Library [free subscription service]: https://archive.org/stream/lostwoodsdiscove00cars#page/250/mode/1up/search/refrains

Extended excerpt  [Non-fiction]: “There is still very limited awareness of the nature of the threat. 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. It is also an era dominated by industry, in which the right to make a dollar at whatever cost is seldom challenged. When the public protests, confronted with some obvious evidence of damaging results of pesticide applications, it is fed little tranquilizing pills of half truth. 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. In the words of Jean Rostand, “The obligation to endure gives us the right to know.” (p. 34)

Context note: In this passage from Silent Spring, Carson quotes Jean Rostand (1894-1977), a prominent French biologist. Rostand wrote the words for an essay published in The UNESCO Chronicle and the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s journal Science. The essay, “Popularization of Science,” concludes: “Have we not, all of us, been transformed into involuntary guinea-pigs ever since atomic fission, without asking our opinion, began to plant harmful particles in our bones? The obligation to endure gives us the right to know. The time is clearly coming when the man in the street will have his say with regard to the great social, national, international and moral issues latterly raised by certain applications of science; and it may be that the specialist himself, weary of bearing on his own the weight of his too-heavy responsibilities, will rejoice at finding understanding and support in public awareness.” (Science, 20 May 1960, Vol. 131, No. 3412, p. 1) See also: Jean Rostand Quotes, Repeat Right page.

Source: Silent Spring (1962 |2002 Mariner edition) International Standard Book Number (ISBN) 0-618-25305-X