Geburtstag: 27. Mai 1907
Todesdatum: 14. April 1964
Rachel Louise Carson war eine US-amerikanische Zoologin, Biologin, Wissenschaftsjournalistin und Sachbuchautorin, deren Hauptwerk „Silent Spring“ aus dem Jahr 1962 häufig als Ausgangspunkt der US-amerikanischen Umweltbewegung bezeichnet wird. Sie selbst gilt als eine der wichtigsten Personen des 20. Jahrhunderts.
Sie begann ihre berufliche Karriere als Biologin des U.S. Bureau of Fisheries. Der erste große schriftstellerische Erfolg Rachel Carsons war das 1951 erschienene Buch „The Sea Around Us“ . Es wurde im Folgejahr mit dem US-amerikanischen National Book Award und der John-Burroughs-Medaille ausgezeichnet. Ihr nächstes Buch „The Edge of the Sea“ sowie ihr wieder aufgelegtes Erstlingswerk „Under the Sea-Wind“ wurden ebenfalls zu Bestsellern. Nach dieser Trilogie, die das Leben im Meer thematisierte, befasste sie sich zunehmend mit Problemen des Umweltschutzes. 1962 erschien ihr bis heute bekanntestes Buch „Silent Spring“ , in dem sie die Auswirkungen eines rigorosen Pestizid-Einsatzes auf Ökosysteme thematisierte. Das Buch löste in den USA eine heftige politische Debatte aus und führte letztlich zum späteren DDT-Verbot.
Rachel Carson wurde im Jahre 1980 postum mit der Presidential Medal of Freedom, der höchsten zivilen Auszeichnung der USA, ausgezeichnet.
— Rachel Carson
Help Your Children to Wonder, Artikel in Women's Home Companion Nr. 83, Juli 1956. Posthum wiederveröffentlicht in Buchform: The Sense of Wonder, Harper, New York 1965. S. 45; zitiert nach Andreas Weber: Mehr Matsch! - Kinder brauchen Natur, Ullstein, Berlin 2011, S. 7
— Rachel Carson
Context: Mankind has gone very far into an artificial world of his own creation. He has sought to insulate himself, in his cities of steel and concrete, from the realities of earth and water and the growing seed. Intoxicated with a sense of his own power, he seems to be going farther and farther into more experiments for the destruction of himself and his world.
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 wonders 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.
Speech accepting the John Burroughs Medal (April 1952); also in Lost Woods: The Discovered Writing of Rachel Carson (1999) edited by Linda Lear, p. 94
— Rachel Carson
Context: We stand now where two roads diverge. But unlike the roads in Robert Frost's familiar poem, they are not equally fair. The road we have long been traveling is deceptively easy, a smooth superhighway on which we progress with great speed, but at its end lies disaster. The other fork of the road — the one less traveled by — offers our last, our only chance to reach a destination that assures the preservation of the earth.
p. 277
— Rachel Carson
Context: I sincerely believe that for the child, and for the parent seeking to guide him, it is not half so important to know as to feel. If facts are the seeds that later produce knowledge and wisdom, then the emotions and the impressions of the senses are the fertile soil in which the seeds must grow. The years of early childhood are the time to prepare the soil. Once the emotions have been aroused — a sense of the beautiful, the excitement of the new and the unknown, a feeling of sympathy, pity, admiration or love — then we wish for knowledge about the subject of our emotional response. Once found, it has lasting meaning. It is more important to pave the way for the child to want to know than to put him on a diet of facts he is not ready to assimilate.
— Rachel Carson
Context: 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.
Letter to the editor, Washington Post (1953); quoted in Lost Woods: The Discovered Writing of Rachel Carson (1999) edited by Linda Lear, p. 99
— Rachel Carson
Context: I like to define biology as the history of the earth and all its life — past, present, and future. To understand biology is to understand that all life is linked to the earth from which it came; it is to understand that the stream of life, flowing out of the dim past into the uncertain future, is in reality a unified force, though composed of an infinite number and variety of separate lives.
Preface to Humane Biology Projects (1961) by the Animal Welfare Institute
— Rachel Carson
Context: 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 and awe-inspiring, is dimmed and even lost before we reach adulthood. 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 disenchantments of later years, the sterile preoccupation with things that are artificial, the alienation from the sources of our strength.
— Rachel Carson
Context: 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.
Acceptance speech of the National Book Award for Nonfiction (1952); also in Lost Woods: The Discovered Writing of Rachel Carson (1999) edited by Linda Lear, p. 91
— Rachel Carson
Context: 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 and awe-inspiring, is dimmed and even lost before we reach adulthood. 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 disenchantments of later years, the sterile preoccupation with things that are artificial, the alienation from the sources of our strength.
— Rachel Carson
Context: I sincerely believe that for the child, and for the parent seeking to guide him, it is not half so important to know as to feel. If facts are the seeds that later produce knowledge and wisdom, then the emotions and the impressions of the senses are the fertile soil in which the seeds must grow. The years of early childhood are the time to prepare the soil. Once the emotions have been aroused — a sense of the beautiful, the excitement of the new and the unknown, a feeling of sympathy, pity, admiration or love — then we wish for knowledge about the subject of our emotional response. Once found, it has lasting meaning. It is more important to pave the way for the child to want to know than to put him on a diet of facts he is not ready to assimilate.
— Rachel Carson
Context: If we have been slow to develop the general concepts of ecology and conservation, we have been even more tardy in recognizing the facts of the ecology and conservation of man himself. We may hope that this will be the next major phase in the development of biology. Here and there awareness is growing that man, far from being the overlord of all creation, is himself part of nature, subject to the same cosmic forces that control all other life. Man's future welfare and probably even his survival depend upon his learning to live in harmony, rather than in combat, with these forces.
"Essay on the Biological Sciences" in Good Reading (1958)
— Rachel Carson
Context: A rainy day is the perfect time for a walk in the woods. I always thought so myself; the Maine woods never seem so fresh and alive as in wet weather. Then all the needles on the evergreens wear a sheath of silver; ferns seem to have grown to almost tropical lushness and every leaf has its edging of crystal drops. Strangely colored fungi — mustard-yellow and apricot and scarlet — are pushing out of the leaf mold and all the lichens and the mosses have come alive with green and silver freshness.
— Rachel Carson, The Sense of Wonder
Context: Those who dwell, as scientists or laymen, among the beauties and mysteries of the earth are never alone or weary of life. 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.
