Rachel Carson Quotes About Environment
-
It is a curious situation that the sea, from which life first arose, should now be threatened by the activities of one form of that life. But the sea, though changed in a sinister way, will continue to exist: the threat is rather to life itself.
→ -
Only yesterday mankind lived in fear of the scourges of smallpox, cholera and plague that once swept nations before them. Now our major concern is no longer with the disease organisms that once were omnipresent; sanitation, better living conditions, and new drugs have given us a high degree of control over infectious disease. Today we are concerned with a different kind of hazard that lurks in our environment-a hazard we ourselves have introduced into our world as our modern way of life has evolved.
→ -
One way to open your eyes is to ask yourself, "What if I had never seen this before? What if I knew i would never see it again?
→ -
How could intelligent beings seek to control a few unwanted species by a method that contaminated the entire environment and brought the threat of disease and death even to their own kind?
→ -
There is no drop of water in the ocean, not even in the deepest parts of the abyss, that does not know and respond to the mysterious forces that create the tide.
→ -
If having endured much, we at last asserted our 'right to know' and if, knowing, we have concluded that we are being asked to take senseless and frightening risks, then we should no longer accept the counsel of those who tell us that we must fill our world with poisonous chemicals, we should look around and see what other course is open to us.
→ -
Along with the possibility of extinction of mankind by nuclear war, the central problem of our age has therefore become the contamination of man's total environment with such substances of incredible potential for harm-substances that accumulate in the tissues of plants and animals and even penetrate the germ cells to shatter or alter the very material of heredity upon which the shape of the future depends.
→ -
We are rightly appalled by the genetic effects of radiation; how then, can we be indifferent to the same effect in chemicals we disseminate widely in our environment?
→ -
In nature nothing exists alone.
→ -
Now I truly believe that we in this generation must come to terms with nature, and I think we're challenged, as mankind has never been challenged before, to prove our maturity and our mastery, not of nature but of ourselves.
→ -
Only within the moment of time represented by the present century has one species -- man -- acquired significant power to alter the nature of the world.
→ -
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.
→ -
Is it reasonable to suppose that we can apply a broad-spectrum insecticide to kill the burrowing larval stages of a crop-destroying insect ... without also killing the 'good' insects whose function may be the essential one of breaking down organic matter and maintaining healthy soil?
→ -
The lasting pleasures of contact with the natural world are not reserved for scientists but are available to anyone who will place himself under the influence of earth, sea and sky and their amazing life.
→ -
The most alarming of all man's assaults upon the environment is the contamination of air, earth, rivers, and sea with dangerous and even lethal materials. This pollution is for the most part irrecoverable; the chain of evil it initiates not only in the world that must support life but in living tissues is for the most part irreversible. In this now universal contamination of the environment, chemicals are the sinister and little-recognized partners of radiation in changing the very nature of the world-the very nature of its life.
→ -
The most alarming of all man's assaults upon the environment is the contamination of air, earth, rivers, and sea with dangerous and even lethal materials.
→ -
Why would anyone believe it is possible to lay down such barrage of poisons on the surface of the earth without making it unfit for all life? They should not be called insecticides, but biocides.
→ -
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.
→ -
Those who contemplate the beauty of the earth find reserves of strength that will endure as long as life lasts.
→ -
Only within the 20th Century has biological thought been focused on ecology, or the relation of the living creature to its environment. Awareness of ecological relationships is - or should be - the basis of modern conservation programs, for it is useless to attempt to preserve a living species unless the kind of land or water it requires is also preserved. So delicately interwoven are the relationships that when we disturb one thread of the community fabric we alter it all - perhaps almost imperceptibly, perhaps so drastically that destruction follows.
→ -
As crude a weapon as a cave man's club, the chemical barrage has been hurled against the fabric of life.
→ -
The more clearly we can focus our attention on the wonders and realities of the universe about us, the less taste we shall have for destruction.
→ -
In every outthrust headland, in every curving beach, in every grain of sand there is the story of the earth.
→ -
Even in the vast and mysterious reaches of the sea we are brought back to the fundamental truth that nothing lives to itself.
→ -
Those who love and free nature are never alone.
→ -
Who has the right to decide that the supreme value is a world without insects even though it would be a sterile world ungraced by the curving wing of a bird in flight. The decision is that of the authoritarian temporarily entrusted with power.
→ -
I like to define biology as the history of the earth and all its life - past, present, and future.
→
Related Authors
-
Sandra Steingraber Biologist -
Garrett Hardin Ecologist -
Paul R. Ehrlich Population Biologist -
John Muir Author -
-
Marie Curie Physicist -
John F. Kennedy 35th U.S. President -
Jane Goodall Primatologist -
Theo Colborn Professor -
Wangari Maathai Political Activist -
Rosalind Franklin Scientist -
Ada Lovelace Countess of Lovelace -
David R. Brower Environmentalist -
Lise Meitner Physicist -
Aldo Leopold Author -
Betty Friedan Writer -
James Lovelock Scientist -
Henry David Thoreau Author -
Al Gore Former Vice President of the United States -
Harriet Tubman Activist