According to The Writer's Almanac with Garrison Keillor, May 27 is the birthday of zoologist and writer Rachel Carson, author of Silent Spring, a book about environmental pollution.
Her second book, The Sea Around Us, won the National Book Award for Nonfiction. I love this quote from her acceptance speech: "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 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 there, but because no one could write truthfully about the sea and leave out the poetry."
Her second book, The Sea Around Us, won the National Book Award for Nonfiction. I love this quote from her acceptance speech: "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 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 there, but because no one could write truthfully about the sea and leave out the poetry."
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