The ‘control of nature’ is a phrase conceived in arrogance, born of the Neanderthal age of biology and philosophy, when it was supposed that nature exists for the convenience of man.
When we go down to the low-tide line, we enter a world that is as old as the earth itself – the primeval meeting place of the elements of earth and water, a place of compromise and conflit and eternal change.
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.
The beauty of the living world I was trying to save has always been uppermost in my mind – that, and anger at the senseless, brutish things that were being done. . . . Now I can believe I have at least helped a little.
By suggestion and example, I believe children can be helped to hear the many voices about them. Take Time to listen and talk about the voices of the earth and what they mean-the majestic voice of thunder, the winds, the sound of surf or flowing streams.
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.
Always the edge of the sea remains an elusive and indefinable boundary. The shore has a dual nature, changing with the swing of the tides, belonging now to the land, now to the sea.
The most alarming of all man’s assaults upon the environment is the contamination of air, earth, rivers, and sea with dangerous and even lethal materials.
