(More of an overview than a real review)

Courage for the Earth: Writers, Scientists, and Activists Celebrate the Life and Writing of Rachel Carson

This is a brilliant collection of essays and excerpts on one of the most important writers of literature of the 20th century. She is most famous for Silent Spring, which brought into public awareness the origins, dangers, and careless wide-spread use of pesticides, and which prompted brutal and personal attacks on her from all sides of government, industry, and the scientific community. The facts of the matter vindicated her and her firm resolve to make a stand, and thankfully the facts did come out before her death by cancer two years after Silent Spring was published.

But she was even more than the author of Silent Spring. She was one of the writers who made science accessible to the average person, who made it interesting and relevant. Her trilogy on ocean life (Under the Sea-Wind, The Sea Around Us, and The Edge of the Sea) were incredibly popular. She was a talented writer who refused to think of science as something in a little box on the shelf to be taken down and used during experiments. Science was part of our everyday life.

>She said that "the aim of science is to discover and illuminate truth. And that, I take it, is the aim of literature, whether biography or history or fiction. It seems to me, then, that there can be no separate literature of science."

She also refused to think of spirituality as something in a little box on the shelf to be taken down and used during church. She saw no need for science or modern life to be sterile and mechanical.

> "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 in there, but because no one could write truthfully about the sea and leave out the poetry."

The essays in this collection show her influence on the world, person by person. Today many people who do not even know the name Rachel Carson believe in what she stood for and have taken her message to heart. She helped make the nation (and the world) aware of us all "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." But she knew it wouldn't be that simple, and, after all these years, we are still not fully awake. Oh, reading this book was very emotional for me. Many of her warnings- many of her scientifically documented cases of the poisons in our air, water, food, and environment- have been pushed aside, swept under the rug, covered up by those who don't want to hear it, those who don't want us to think about it, because they make too much money from the way things are. Try to go through the day without ingesting bleach, plastic, or pharmaceuticals. It should be easy, right? And yet, no. We are doing it everyday, and we aren't even aware of the fact. It is hardly safe or sane to continue on this path. So why are we still on it, after almost 50 years?

If there is any hope for us at all, it may well come from a wish Rachel Carson made for the world herself,

> that every child in the world have "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."

I, too, wish that we reconnect with the real, living world around us, and see through our illusions of independent power and grandeur, and be made whole again by the very world we have demeaned and seem hell-bent on destroying. Let us understand what our everyday choices mean, let us choose our future more carefully. Let us not give in to apathy; let us not give in to despair. Let us instead have courage for the earth.

(There is a whole trove of other books mentioned in this book that I need to go find now. And I want to reread her work again as well.) ( )

Containing essays by famous writers, scientists, and activists, this book reminded me of why I've always been a fan of Rachel Carson. Many of the essays have overlapping themes, but overall it was a good read. ( )