Rachel Carson Quotes

Probably the most visible example of unintended consequences, is what happens every time humans try to change the natural ecology of a place.

As cruel a weapon as the cave man's club, the chemical barrage has been hurled against the fabric of life.

One thought that occurs to me is that men will continue to withdraw from nature in order to create an environment that will suit them better.

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?

I just wonder what it would be like to be reincarnated in an animal whose species had been so reduced in numbers than it was in danger of extinction. What would be its feelings toward the human species whose population explosion had denied it somewhere to exist. I must confess that I am tempted to ask for reincarnation as a particularly deadly virus.

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.

Humans on the Earth behave in some ways like a pathogenic micro-organism, or like the cells of a tumor.

Fossil energy is the worst discovery man ever made, and his disruption of the carbon-oxygen cycle is the greatest of his triumphs over nature. Through thinner and thinner air we labor toward our last end, conquerors finally of even the earth chemistry that created us.

It seems that every time mankind is given a lot of energy, we go out and wreck something with it.

The destruction of the natural beauty, the ecosystems, and the majesty of mountains affect us in ways we're not even aware of. Every time a mountain is beheaded, we chop off a little part of our souls.

Wild animals are just as confused as people are now. You've got toxins in the water, oil, sewage, all sorts of things.

Natural capital is easy to overlook because it is the pond we swim in. One can live perfectly well without ever giving a thought to the sulfur cycle or wetland functions. Only when the benefits nature provides are disrupted do we take notice.

Like all animals, human beings have always taken what they want from nature. But we are the rogue species. We are unique in our ability to use resources on a scale and at a speed that our fellow species can't.

The idea that we're somehow centrally important to the planet's existence is pretty comical - although I'd like us to be.

Humans are upsetting a fragile balance that their own human ancestors established.

We're not environmentally doing very good things to this planet, and we might not be around too long.

The conscious purpose of science is control of Nature; its unconscious effect is disruption and chaos.

People in general romanticize nature, and they make it out to be something that it isn't because humans are so awful. And yes, we are absolutely screwing up this planet, but that is only because we have the capabilities to do so. Animals are not better than us. They are not nicer than us.

Man is complex—he makes deserts bloom and lakes die.

Man is everywhere a disturbing agent. Wherever he plants his foot, the harmonies of nature are turned to discords.

The potential in many environmental issues is that if you undertake corrective action without appropriate understanding of the problem, then you wind up doing more harm than good.

If industrial man continues to multiply his numbers and expand his operations he will succeed in his apparent intention, to seal himself off from the natural and isolate himself within a synthetic prison of his own making.

We discover too late that we have turned a blind eye to the extinction of a species that is essential to the balance of life in a particular context. Or we discover too late that the importation of a foreign life-form, animal or vegetable, has upset local ecosystems, damaging soil or neighbouring life-forms. We discover that we have come near the end of supplies-of fossil-fuels for example -on which we have built immense structures of routine expectation.

Trees are poems the earth writes upon the sky, We fell them down and turn them into paper, That we may record our emptiness.

We have vexed and bothered every plant and every animal on every continent.