Here’s the mother of the modern environmental movement, on the importance of nurturing children’s connection with the natural world.

Boy scout photographing nature at the Edwin B. Forsythe National Wildlife Refuge. Photo credit: USFWS, via flickr Commons

“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.”

—Rachel Carson, The Sense of Wonder, 1956