The shore is an ancient world, for as long as there has been an earth and sea there has been this place of the meeting of land and water.

The human race is challenged more than ever before to demonstrate our mastery, not over nature but of ourselves.

The procedure has a strange Alice-in-Wonderland quality. The reservoir was created as a public water supply, yet the community, probably unconsulted about the sportsmen's project, is forced either to drink water containing poisonous residues or to pay our tax money for treatment of the water to remove the poisons - treatments that are by no means foolproof.

As crude a weapon as the cave man's club, the chemical barrage has been hurled against the fabric of life - a fabric on the one hand delicate and destructible, on the other miraculously tough and resilient, and capable of striking back in unexpected ways. These extraordinary capacities of life have been ignored by the practitioners of chemical control who have brought to their task no "high-minded orientation," no humility before the vast forces with which they tamper.

The more I learned about the use of pesticides, the more appalled I became. I realized that here was the material for a book. What I discovered was that everything which meant most to me as a naturalist was being threatened, and that nothing I could do would be more important.

In every outthrust headland, in every curving beach, in every grain of sand there is the story of the earth.

The more clearly we can focus our attention on the wonders and realities of the universe about us, the less taste we shall have for destruction.