Sense of Wonder

[telemicus]

"...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

Comments

[anonymous]

Why are you reading Carson's work? It strikes me that the advocacy of feeling rather than knowing, which might be admirable from other sources, is unpleasantly unrepentant coming from someone who has killed so many millions on the basis of scientific falsehood, sometimes knowingly so, passionately advocated.

[jamesofengland]

This was me; sorry about being logged out.

[telemicus]

Killed so many millions, huh? Oookay, I'll bite.

I have no idea who she is, I'm not so much reading her work as collecting a quote I found and liked, and that ties in with research on how not to raise a sociopath :D

[jamesofengland]

She's the woman whose junk science ended the WHO's relatively successful campaign to wipe out malaria with DDT. Hence malaria being common in places where it was not completely wiped out before her book/ campaign. 1-3 million a year preventable deaths, hundreds of millions of crippling infections a year.

To be fair, she died before the science was clear on the topic, but she was very clear that the science wasn't what mattered so much as the quasi-religious opposition to interference with nature.