What It Would Take to See the World Completely Differently

Those who contemplate the beauty of the earth find reserves of strength that will endure as long as life lasts. There is symbolic as well as actual beauty in the migration of the birds, the ebb and flow of the tides, the folded bud ready for the spring. There is something infinitely healing in the repeated refrains of nature—the assurance that dawn... See more

In our day-to-day lives, pure enjoyment of nature can seem somehow suspect or unproductive, and the justification of such time spent is often couched in utilitarian or economic terms. Walks are for clearing heads; hikes are good exercise. Carson anticipated this line of thinking. In The Sense of Wonder, she asks rhetorically, “What is the value of ... See more

As writer Naomi Klein points out in On Fire: The (Burning) Case for a Green New Deal, our “culture of the perpetual present” is not equipped to deal with the generations-long nature of the crisis.

The climate crisis requires urgency on a global scale: Countries need to act, policies need to be set in motion. But slowness is needed as well.

Is wonder still possible, given our climate crisis? Wonder implies some degree of leisure and time; it requires slow, sustained, and contemplative attention—a luxury that, perhaps, we can no longer afford.

Determined to avoid what she later called the “human bias” of popular science writing, Carson sought to portray the world of waters solely from a creaturely perspective, urging readers to “shed [their] human perceptions.”

Why did Carson feel so strongly the need to proselytize the wonders of wonder? Perhaps she sensed that, without it, an emotional connection with nature would be impossible; without it, the environmental movement had no hope.

once found, (wonder) could serve as “an unfailing antidote against the boredom and disenchantments of later years, the sterile preoccupation with things that are artificial.” Wonder led to a sense of the beautiful, which led to the pursuit of knowledge about the object that triggered the feeling in the first place.

(She had a) deep conviction that wonder had to be at the foundation of any relationship with nature.