My wife is from Springdale. She lived within walking distance of the Homestead when we met.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rachel_Carson_Homestead

I read her first book, The Sea Around Us, when I was still a teenager. My love affair with her, and with the sea, began at that moment. I quickly followed up with Under the Sea Wind and The Edge of the Sea, her great trilogy on the ocean and its life.

The first is a text on oceanography, written by a scientist and a poet. The second was three detailed case studies of three separate lifeforms in three marine environments, also composed by a scientist and a poet. The last was a naturalist’s exploration of the geography and ecology of the North American Atlantic coast and the three great habitats that comprise it: the rocky shores, the rim of sand, and the coral coast. It was written from an ecological point of view, not just as a field guide to the identification and biology of the creatures found there (which it accomplishes most successfully), but how they are integrated with the physical environment that surrounds and shapes them. It is a masterpiece of both natural history and art.

As a writer, she has always been my inspiration, not only for the breathtaking elegance of her prose, but for her keen technical understanding of the totality of nature and its underlying unity. Her work is the perfect counter for those who cannot see the reverence and spirituality, the love, that is at the heart of all science.

I never read the book for which she is most famous–and hated: Silent Spring. I preferred to remember her for her celebration of nature, not her mourning and despair for its callous and pointless destruction.