As crude a weapon as a cave man’s club, the chemical barrage has been hurled against the fabric of life.
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.
Knowing what I do, there would be no future peace for me if I kept silent.
Beginnings are apt to be shadowy.
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.
Those who dwell, as scientists or laymen, among the beauties and mysteries of the earth, are never alone or weary of life.
It is ironic to think that man might determine his own future by something so seemingly trivial as the choice of an insect spray.
In nature nothing exists alone.
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.
A child’s world is fresh and new and beautiful, full of wonder and excitement. It is our misfortune that for most of us that clear-eyed vision, that true instinct for what is beautiful, is dimmed and even lost before we reach adulthood.
The edge of the sea is a strange and beautiful place.
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.
The question is whether any civilization can wage relentless war on life without destroying itself, and without losing the right to be called civilized.
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.
It is a wholesome and necessary thing for us to turn again to the earth and in the contemplation of her beauties to know the sense of wonder and humility.
It is also an era dominated by industry, in which the right to make a dollar at whatever cost is seldom challenged.
Then the song of a whitethroat, pure and ethereal, with the dreamy quality of remembered joy.
Autumn comes to the sea with a fresh blaze of phosphorescence, when every wave crest is aflame. Here and there the whole surface may glow with sheets of cold fire, while below schools of fish pour through the water like molten metal.
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.
The shore is an ancient world, for as long as there has been an earth and sea there has been this place of the meeting of land and water.