What It Would Take to See the World Completely Differently

When the marine biologist Rachel Carson was a young girl, she discovered a fossilized shell while hiking around her family’s hillside property in Springdale, Pennsylvania. Those who knew her then would later contend that this relic sparked such intense reverie in her that she instantly felt a tug toward the sea. What was this ancient creature, and what was the world it had known?

Though Carson had never seen the sea herself, she threw herself into its study. She studied biology, then zoology, eventually taking a job as a writer for the U.S. Bureau of Fisheries. All of this was incredibly rare for a young woman in the 1920s and ’30s, but Carson’s trajectory was a demonstration of the expansive potential of curiosity. It also reflected the tireless tutelage of her mother, Maria, who had instilled a love of the wild in her children by regularly taking them on walks to learn about botany and birds. Carson absorbed these lessons and, throughout her life, maintained a deep conviction that wonder had to be at the foundation of any relationship with nature.

In her final months, Carson, age 56, sickened from cancer treatments and in constant pain, still had a couple of remaining projects in mind. One of these was what she called the “wonder book.” By that point, Carson had already written four best-selling books, most famously , which the dangers of pesticides, including DDT, and is now widely credited with catalyzing the modern environmental movement. Yet Carson felt she had one more thing to say. The “wonder book”—published posthumously as —was based on a lyrical essay about the importance of cultivating wonder in children. Perhaps