I will exalt you, my God the King; I will praise your name for ever and ever.  Every day I will praise you and extol your name for ever and ever. Great is the LORD and most worthy of praise; his greatness no one can fathom. One generation will commend your works to another; they will tell of your mighty acts. They will speak of the glorious splendor of your majesty, and I will meditate on your wonderful works (Psalm 145:1-5)

Poor Rachel Carson (May 27, 1907 – April 14, 1964) can’t seem to rest in peace.  Ever since her book Silent Spring virtually spawned the modern Environmental Movement, her scientific conclusions about DDT have been accepted, rejected, challenged and re-researched so often that it’s hard to know the truth about it.  Mostly, however, the issue has been an economic football kicked from post to post in a hard-fought battle between conservative libertarians and perceived “liberal” scientists.  For sure the issue has kept in everyone’s attention the advisability of spreading “cides” all over the landscape and has rightly cautioned us about using them without knowing all of the effects and side-effects of their use.

Rachel grew up in rural Pennsylvania and loved to explore and learn from the natural world as she ambled around her family’s 65-acre farm.  She was such an astute observer and good student that she had an article published when she was eleven!  Her sense of wonder in nature never left her.  In fact, it became the topic of another of her books: The Sense of Wonder.  The following quote from the book is found on the WOC page Creation Quotations and Wonder Kids.  Although Carson was not known as a follower of Christ and was probably a secular naturalist, her views on children and the sense of wonder are wise words for us to heed:

A child’s world is fresh and new and beautiful, full of wonder and excitement. It is our misfortune that for most of us that clear-eyed vision, that true instinct for what is beautiful and awe-inspiring, is dimmed and even lost before we reach adulthood. 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 that are artificial, the alienation from the sources of our strength.

If a child is to keep alive his inborn sense of wonder without any such gift from the fairies, he needs the companionship of at least one adult who can share it, rediscovering with him the joy, excitement and mystery of the world we live in. Parents often have a sense of inadequacy when confronted on the one hand with the eager, sensitive mind of a child and on the other with a world of complex physical nature, inhabited by a life so various and unfamiliar that it seems hopeless to reduce it to order and knowledge. In a mood of self-defeat, they exclaim, “How can I possibly teach my child about nature—why, I don’t even know one bird from another!”

I sincerely believe that for the child, and for the parent seeking to guide him, it is not half so important to know as to feel. If facts are the seeds that later produce knowledge and wisdom, then the emotions and the impressions of the senses are the fertile soil in which the seeds must grow. The years of early childhood are the time to prepare the soil. Once the emotions have been aroused—a sense of the beautiful, the excitement of the new and the unknown, a feeling of sympathy, pity, admiration or love—then we wish for knowledge about the object of our emotional response. Once found, it has lasting meaning. It is more important to pave the way for the child to want to know than to put him on a diet of facts he is not ready to assimilate.

[From The Sense of Wonder, by Rachel L. Carson]

[Our grandchildren---from top to bottom:  Gunnar, Elle, and Anna]