#Rachel Carson

[nobeerreviews]

Those who contemplate the beauty of the earth find reserves of strength that will endure as long as life lasts.

-- Rachel Carson

(Rheinfall, Switzerland)

[exhaled-spirals]

« Who has known the ocean? Neither you nor I, with our earth-bound senses, know the foam and surge of the tide that beats over the crab hiding under the seaweed of his tide pool home; or the lilt of the long, slow swells of mid-ocean, where shoals of wandering fish prey and are preyed upon […]. Nor can we know the vicissitudes of life on the ocean floor, where the sunlight, filtering through a hundred feet of water, makes but a fleeting, bluish twilight, where swarms of diminutive fish twinkle through the dusk like a silver rain of meteors, and eels lie in wait among the rocks.

Even less is it given to man to descend those six incomprehensible miles into the recesses of the abyss, where reign utter silence and unvarying cold and eternal night. […] Increasing with every foot of depth, enormous pressures reach, three thousand fathoms down, the inconceivable magnitude of three tons to every square inch of surface. In these silent deeps a glacial cold prevails, a bleak iciness which never varies, summer or winter, years melting into centuries, and centuries into ages of geologic time. There, too, darkness reigns – the blackness of primeval night in which the ocean came into being, unbroken, through eons of succeeding time, by the gray light of dawn.

[…] Preying one upon another, the abyssal creatures are ultimately dependent upon the slow rain of dead plants and animals from above. Every living thing of the ocean, plant and animal alike, returns to the water at the end of its own life span the materials that had been temporarily assembled to form its body. So there descends into the depths a gentle, never-ending rain of the disintegrating particles of what once were living creatures of the sunlit surface waters, or of those twilight regions beneath. Individual elements are lost to view, only to reappear again and again in different incarnations in a kind of material immortality. »

— “Undersea”, from Lost Woods: The Discovered Writing of Rachel Carson, ed. Linda Lear

[liebesfraulein]

Those who contemplate the beauty of the earth find reserves of strength that will endure as long as life lasts. There is something infinitely healing in the repeated refrains of nature — the assurance that dawn comes after night, and spring after winter.

— Rachel Carson, Silent Spring

[yourdailyqueer]

Rachel Carson (deceased)

Gender: Female

Sexuality: Lesbian

DOB: 27 May 1907 

RIP: 14 April 1964

Ethnicity: White - American

Occupation: Writer, marine biologist, conservationist

Note 1: Her book Silent Spring and other writings are credited with advancing the global environmental movement.

Note 2: Had a relationship with Dorothy Freeman, which was conducted mainly through letters and during summers spent together in Maine. Over 12 years, they exchanged around 900 letters.

[julesofnature]

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. ~Rachel Carson, (1907 – 1964)

[literaryvein-reblogs]

Khalil Gibran. Charles Addams. Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Anthony Burgess. Italo Calvino. Vladimir Nabokov. Rachel Carson. John Muir. Jane Austen. Arthur Rimbaud. Marcel Proust. Maxim Gorky.

More: Quote Prompts

[arthistoryanimalia]

#FishFriday / #FrogFriday mashup:

Maurits Cornelis Escher (Dutch, 1898-1972)

Fish and Frogs, 1949

Wood engraving

Catalogue raisonné: Bool #364

image © The M.C. Escher Company B.V. - Baarn-Holland. [educational use]

This print was owned by Rachel Carson (a personal hero of mine), and Escher was inspired by her work as well; see link below for the story!

M.C. Escher on Loneliness, Creativity, and How Rachel Carson Inspired His Art, with a Side of Bach

[geopsych]

"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.”

—Rachel Carson

[thirdity]

We still talk in terms of "conquest" — whether it be of the insect world or of the mysterious world of space. We still have not become mature enough to see ourselves as a very tiny part of a vast and incredible universe, a universe that is distinguished above all else by a mysterious and wonderful unity that we flout at our peril.

Rachel Carson, "Of Man and the Stream of Time"

[nobeerreviews]

To stand at the edge of the sea, to sense the ebb and flow of the tides, to feel the breath of a mist moving over a great salt marsh, to watch the flight of shore birds that have swept up and down the surf lines of the continents for untold thousands of years, to see the running of the old eels and the young shad to the sea, is to have knowledge of things that are as nearly eternal as any earthly life can be.

-- Rachel Carson

(Greece)

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

[SGI:: 2024]

* * * *

“To stand at the edge of the sea, to sense the ebb and flow of the tides, to feel the breath of a mist moving over a great salt marsh, to watch the flight of shore birds that have swept up and down the surf lines of the continents for untold thousands of years, to see the running of the old eels and the young shad to the sea, is to have knowledge of things that are as nearly eternal as any earthly life can be. These things were before ever man stood on the shore of the ocean and looked out upon it with wonder; they continue year in, year out, through the centuries and the ages, while man’s kingdoms rise and fall.”

— Rachel Carson, Under the Sea Wind

[entheognosis]

Those who contemplate the beauty of the earth find reserves of strength that will endure as long as life lasts. There is symbolic as well as actual beauty in the migration of the birds, the ebb and flow of the tides, the folded bud ready for the spring. There is something infinitely healing in the repeated refrains of nature, the assurance that dawn comes after night, and spring after the winter.

Rachel Carson

La Source

by Pascal Ferry

[smashorpassgilf]

Sadly biologist Rachel Carson died of cancer at only 56... but her book Silent Spring is eligible, first published in 1962! So here's a submission for her very important book 📗

(Hope this submission subterfuge is okay)

[abwwia]

Rachel Carson on her porch in Southport, Maine, 1955 (Courtesy of Martha Freeman)

[julesofnature]

"Man's attitude toward nature is today critically important simply because we have now acquired a fateful power to alter and destroy nature. But man is a part of nature, and his war against nature is inevitably a war against himself? [We are] challenged as mankind has never been challenged before to prove our maturity and our mastery, not of nature, but of ourselves." ~Silent Spring, Rachel Carson

[lithub]

July 18, 2025

Today, we’re scratching our heads at the Defense Department’s book ban list, considering diaspora and healing, and more!

On Lit Hub dot com:

The Defense Department wants to ban hundreds of books. Here are the weirdest titles. | The Hub

“Gaza has become the world’s conscience—which is not something anybody asked for.” Hala Alyan discusses diaspora, healing, and her memoir, I’ll Tell You When I’m Home. | Lit Hub In Conversation

Why Rachel Carson’s relationship with Dorothy Freeman and her environmental writing are deeply entwined. | Lit Hub Politics

Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s The Bewitching, Laurie Gwen Shapiro’s The Aviator and the Showman, and Vivek Shanbhag’s Sakina’s Kiss all feature among the best reviewed books of the week. | Book Marks

Matthew Clark Davison and Alice LaPlante on the power of writing into beauty. | Lit Hub Craft

Emily Buchanan rethinks climate grief through the lens of magical realism. | Lit Hub Criticism

“My favorite novels are those that leave you thinking.” Chloe Michelle Howarth considers how pieces of writing should end. | Lit Hub Craft

“The first time I went shooting in America I hit a tree.” Read from Tehila Hakimi’s novel Hunting in America, translated by Joanna Chen. | Lit Hub Fiction

From around the internet:

“It is one of these really interesting and very unusual situations where we have a legend that was widely known and hugely popular throughout the Middle Ages, and then very suddenly in the middle of the 16th century, in the High Renaissance, it’s just completely lost.” Researchers have finally solved a centuries-old literary cold case. | 404 Media

Tori McCandless examines the queer joy of BBC Three’s I Kissed a Girl. | Public Books

Gaby Del Valle investigates how ICE hit lists compiled by right wing groups endanger student protesters. | The Verge 

Alexander Chee writes about going to Denny’s: “I will feel a little more alone after that night in some way I will never understand and always try to forget.” | Los Angeles Review of Books

Holly Beddingfield explores what it means to navigate the present media landscape as a Zillennial. | Dirt

“Somewhere between lies the truth, that adult and child may as well be two different species for their mutual incomprehensibility.” Barry Petchesky on the otherworldly snowmen of Calvin and Hobbes. | Defector

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