Quoted in Newsweek, December 10, 1973, p. 75.
“It is strange how few people make more than a casual cult of enjoying Nature.”
Source: The Meaning of Culture (1929), p. 178
Source: A Glastonbury Romance
Context: It is strange how few people make more than a casual cult of enjoying Nature. And yet the earth is actually and literally the mother of us all. One needs no strange spiritual faith to worship the earth.
Source: The Pure and the Impure
All the Myriad Ways (p. 79)
Short fiction, N-Space (1990)
As quoted by Robert A. Fitton (editor) in Leadership: Quotations From the Military Tradition (1990), p. 126
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
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.
Source: Dynamics Of Theology, Chapter Eight, Symbolic Religious Communication, p. 147
