I just watched a beautiful television program (link below) about the life of Rachel Carson.  Carson was born in 1907 and died in 1964.  She was a marine biologist, conservationist and gifted writer who is credited with advancing the environmental movement.  Her books, “The Sea Around Us”, “The Edge of the Sea” and “The Silent Spring” inspire us with their beauty, courage and insight.  She wrote, “To understand the shore, it is not enough to catalog its life.  Understanding comes only when, standing on a beach, we can sense the long rhythms of earth and sea that sculptured its land-forms and produced the rock and sand of which it is composed; when we can sense with the eye and ear of the mind the surge of life beating always at its shores – blindly, inexorably pressing for a foothold. ”

With those words in mind, I wonder, how we live in a world where fake news proliferates and people feel it is okay to lie and treat others poorly.  I wonder if we will bequeath a frightening future to our children because many feel it is okay to destroy the planet for profit.  It is time to speak the truth.  And it is time to protect our precious environment.

Sadly, Carson’s words are still appropriate today. “We still talk in terms of conquest. We still haven’t become mature enough to think of ourselves as only a tiny part of a vast and incredible universe. 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.”

Rachel Carson was not afraid to speak up.  We can do the same and also make one of her wishes come true.  It was, “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 artificial, the alienation from the sources of our strength.”

Program link:  http://www.pbs.org/video/2365935530/