Nature Book Reader June 2020 - Flipbook - Page 34
A Nature Book Reader
JILL CRAWFORD
Jill Crawford is a rural Northern Irish writer of fiction & non-fiction
The Sense of Wonder
by Rachel Carson, with photos by Nick Kelsh
An engineer and adventurer,
from Boise in Idaho, told me
to look up Rachel Carson
- told me so, I think, on the
basis of an essay I’d made
about words as seashells.
Carson, though famous,
had not yet reached my
awareness. Reading her, I felt
that I’d chanced on someone
I must never forget, due
to the potent and seemly
steer of her language; due
to the loving passion which
imbued the ideas, reviving
in this reader an affinity with
the natural world that had
fuzzed a bit since childhood.
Carson didn’t shirk, in spite
of those who were unwilling
to listen and eager to silence
or defame. In her books, she
explained and proved, with
beauty and exactness, what
she believed and knew to be
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true. For me, her writing is an
antidote to despair, as active
and holy and sentient and
sensuous as anything written.
Among others, Margaret
Atwood has spoken of her
innovation, the trailblazing:
“The world is catching up
with her.”
After publishing the
environmentally-attuned
and urgent Silent Spring
(excerpted in the New
Yorker), whose audacity
and enquiry set her against
dominant institutions in
science and industry, Carson
wrote The Sense of Wonder,
her last work. It was partly
finished when she died; she
knew she was dying as she
wrote. In its published form,
illustrated with delightful
textured photography, it’s
a brief book, yet full of
