An interview with Kaiulani Lee
by Sherri Miles
The room is dark and hushed save for low whispers and the occasional creak of an auditorium seat. The stage curtains slowly part and low lights shine on a few heavy pieces of 1950's office furniture neatly arranged in the middle of an otherwise empty stage. Actress Kaiulani Lee approaches the audience and in a low, clear voice, describes the events of this one-person play in which she portrays the character, Rachel Carson. The first act takes place as a Maine autumn approaches: Miss Carson is preparing to leave her summer home and return to Silver Spring; she is struggling against cancer and is unsure if she will ever again see her beloved seaside retreat. The second act is set two months later at her home in Maryland; controversy swirls around her as the chemical industry, the government, and the press react to her landmark book, Silent Spring, which she has written to warn us of our overuse and misuse of chemical pesticides.
The actress turns back toward the set. Boxes lie about waiting to be packed, but she is drawn instead to an enormous desk piled high with books and papers. She sits down carefully and begins to write. Her words flow onto the page and out to our ears, words sharing an intimate discovery about the monarch butterfly, words that make us suddenly notice the transformation before our eyes: Rachel Carson, 'mother of the age of ecology', is at her desk writing a letter to a friend.
Rachel Carson's mother bequeathed to her a love for the natural world and reverence for all forms of life, a passion Miss Carson first directed toward studies of marine biology and zoology, later toward her sea-inspired natural history writing, and finally toward warning the public about the dangers of toxic chemicals. After seeing Kaiulani Lee embody this remarkable legacy in A Sense of Wonder I spoke with her in a telephone interview to discuss this unforgettable play, and why and how she is bringing Rachel Carson to life for audiences across the country.
S.M.: How did you first hear about Rachel Carson?
K.L.: She was a point of reference for me as a child because my family is from Maine and she summered just up the coast. When planes flew over spraying insecticides to get rid of mosquitoes, her name always came up. Later, as a teenager and in my early 20's, I read her sea books and loved them. I was not what you would call a student of science but she taught me that I could understand sea life, ant that my love could be enhanced by being able to name what I saw.
Why was it important for you to write this play and become this person?
When I initially set out to do something in defense of the natural world, I didn't know it was going to be about Rachel Carson. It was my husband who said, why reinvent the wheel, why don't you go back and reread Rachel Carson. I had never read Silent Spring, so I started there and was horrified. For the first time I was really disappointed with my parents, their friends, that whole generation for having had all this information and doing nothing about it. I thought grown-ups were supposed to fix things. I had this childish response of outrage that the world had gone on and ignored this information at everybody's peril, at everything's peril, and then there was this sudden revelation: I'm the grown-up now, I'm the parent, and I better do something. It was really that simple. It was like big sock in the face.
Then I started to work on the play; I already felt a strong connection with Miss Carson. The more I read her articles, her letters, her journal entries, the more I saw she articulated much of what I felt. The profound mysteries of life are all around us in the natural world, and in its destruction I believe we lose some part of our connection with the divine. In the world we seem to be creating today, the paving over of the natural world, I don't find a place there, there's no breath there, there's no center, no heart.
As a mother and teacher, I have a sense that kids today are separated from nature. When I asked my children's classmates what their experience was with nature, one young boy said Little League. This was not the answer I expected or wanted. I feel that unless we give kids a sense of this world bigger than themselves, bigger than mankind, unless we introduce them to it, unless they are encouraged to participate with it, have a relationship with it, a chance to fall in love with it, they will never defend it. They won't know to because they will think of it as wholly other.
As we become more suburban and urbanized, there is less and less of a connection with the natural world. I think it is urgent that we scrape up some of this asphalt and introduce our children to this larger concept of the world, where man is only a part of the puzzle, albeit an integral and important part. The reason I wrote the play was to reach out to this next generation and to inspire our own generation to take responsibility for guiding them.
You chose the closing years of Rachel Carson's life as the time period of your play. Why did you pick this particular part of her life?
Almost everybody who has heard of Miss Carson knows of her through Silent Spring. They know of her as an advocate, but I thought it was very important to introduce her as a human being, to show how she became the writer of Silent Spring. She always hoped to be remembered for her love of the natural world and I believe that it was that love that forced her to write Silent Spring. I think of Act 1 as poetic, as memory, as she sifts through her relationships with people and place. Then Act 2 brings us right up to the present and tries to take the audience through the Calvary of writing Silent Spring. I didn't want to start with her as the heroine, as the advocate, I wanted to start with the beauty and the sense of wonder, which I believe was what gave her the courage and commitment to be the advocate.
What were some of the important changes she helped bring about?
She brought to our attention our misuse and overuse of chemical pesticides, but that was small, that wasn't her field of interest even. By attacking that particular issue she engaged in a larger argument about man's inability to destroy the natural world, and she focused our attention on the underbelly of our highly industrialized, technological society.
We were all being taught from the 1950's on about the wonders of these new technologies, of what we would be able to accomplish, of how they were going to free us up, how they were going to give us more power and control, but nobody talked about the risks. Rachel Carson brought up the shadow and put light to it, saying everything has a cost and everything is interrelated. The tangible things happened soon after her death, after the Congressional hearings - DDT was banned, numerous environmental protection laws were passed, including the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, and NEPA, and the EPA was created. There is a direct corollary between Silent Spring, the first Congressional hearings, and all that followed.
What is it you most want people to know about Rachel Carson and carry with them after seeing your play?
I think her courage is unbelievable. She had no old boy network, she was poor, she was very ill, had no funds, no grant, no sponsor, a lawsuit threatened against her, and she was attempting something incredibly controversial in the writing of Silent Spring. She knew the book was going to evoke fury. The information coming to her from scientists and field workers and doctors all over the world was incredibly pessimistic. She was pooling all this information that had never been looked at as a whole, and the outcome looked dismal. I think it was incredibly depressing to her. Not only did she have no backing, little support within the scientific community, but the Department of Agriculture was going to be furious, and it was part of her own government where she had worked for 16 years.
She didn't want to write the book. She wanted to write a book about children and nature, but she felt compelled to. In one of her letters, she wrote about no longer being able to watch the birds and enjoy nature without speaking out about what she knew. She was psychologically courageous, physically courageous, and she put everything on the line. I think her strength is a very simple story about a woman who loves the natural world and has the courage to fight in its defense. It is my hope that her courage and sense of wonder will comfort us and send us out into nature to participate, to play, to be entangled in the mysteries. As I said earlier, I believe it will be through falling in love with nature that we will make the commitment to defend it.
How did you research writing this play?
I interviewed over a dozen people who had been part of her life - friends, family, co-workers. I read everything that I could find. I started with her books, went to the Library of congress, read her articles, her writings for Fish and Wildlife. Meanwhile I read Paul Brooks' book about her, The House of Life. He was her editor and publisher at Houghton Mifflin; he did the Sea Around Us and Silent Spring, and was very close to her. I met him and worked with him for about 3 ½ years. He guided me and supported me and every time I thought I should give up, he pushed me forward. One day he sent me a quote of Miss Carson's, which is in the play, "I believe that the subject chooses the writer; it's not the other way around." I couldn't have written the play without Paul Brooks' help.
For more than 30 years you have played many roles on and off Broadway and television, how does the playing of Rachel Carson fit in or contrast with other work you have done?
It is totally different and it is the most difficult. The day of performance I worry that I am not going to be able to do it. I have been doing the play for over 7 years and each time it scares me that I am not going to be able to make the transformation. Theater, like all art forms, is created through craft and I have years of study and performance that have not only helped me to create the play, but that act as a safety net around me in performance, but in this party the actual transformation from me to Miss Carson feels like free fall. I let go and Miss Carson comes in, and I have never had that experience before.
How is it fulfilling for you?
It is unimaginable. The elation after a performance is extraordinary. I love the silence during the play as the audience is really listening, and the resounding ovation at the end lets me know they really got it. The audience is always deeply moved by her story.
What types of audiences request your performance?
I do a lot of shows at universities for science, environmental studies, and English departments (she won the national book award, she was a magnificent writer), as well as for philosophy, religion, drama, rhetoric, and women's studies programs. I'm delighted so many different departments request it; it almost defines interdisciplinary. I am also doing more and more shows for conferences, large meetings, the Society of Environmental Journalists, groups of science teachers, conservation groups, the Sierra Club Centennial, Fish and Wildlife, and museums. I'm amazed at the variety of requests.
After your performance is over, you come back onstage as yourself and answer questions from the audience about Rachel Carson. Can you share some of the questions and comments that have arisen?
The audience always wants to know if Roger is okay. Roger is her great-nephew who she adopts and raises, and he has a large presence in the play. They also want to know how I came to write the play, what my connection to Ms. Carson is, what she would think of the state of things today, what she would think about our use of pesticides, of terminator seeds, of BGH. Different audiences bring in different specifics, but they want to know whether she would be discouraged, and where she would tell us to go today. They want to know if there has been another book or another author who has carried on in her tradition.
Sometimes the questions and discussions go on for a full hour or more and turn to local concerns. Sometimes the audience asks personal questions about her because they know I have had access to so much material. The question and answer period is always a wonderful exchange; I love it.
In her last year, Ms. Carson fulfilled a life-long dream to visit the Muir Woods when she was out in California accepting an award. Do you have a sense of why this was so important to her?
I mention it in the play because anybody who is a staunch environmentalist or a lover of nature tries to spend as much time as they can seeing the beautiful things of this world. Here was a woman we consider one of the heads of our environmental tradition, and she got to see so little. Her short life was too full of work and family responsibilities to enable her to see some of nature's magnificent sights, but she went on daily walks and did bird watching when she had time, and learned to see nature's beauty in the woods around her house, along the coasts of Maine, and certainly, in the sea.
Do you feel you have been changed by entering into Rachel Carson's world; are you different now than when you first began playing this role?
A life change has happened, but it's not from playing the role. It was in the writing of the play. I had no idea this would happen, but it is as if I found my voice, as if I defined what it was I believed.
There comes a time in life, and I certainly felt it in her life, when you wonder what your obligation is as a human being, whether it's to live as you believe life should be lived in harmony with the world around you, in a community, building up that community, and/or if there is a larger ill that's infesting, is your obligation to be a warrior, to be a soldier and go out and fight those battles which let you live the life you believe you should be living.
When I'm touring the show, I wonder, would it be better to be stationary in a community, would it be better for my soul to be farming, and my questions mirror Ms. Carson's own struggle between wanting to just live what she believed and being a public advocate, the private versus the public call. I think the answer for me, for now, is in the balance, in doing both as best I can.
Why is it important to bring Rachel Carson alive today?
When I started writing and researching, all of her books except for Silent Spring were out of print, and now they are all back in print, so that in itself is thrilling. We might have lost her, and that is frightening to think and makes me wonder who we have lost, what ideas we have lost.
One of the reasons she will stay famous is because she changed nature writing forever - the traditional role of the naturalist was to record what they saw. She did this with her sea books, but by the time she wrote Silent Spring it was more than that: She became an advocate. She had always felt that nature was so large and so powerful that if we hurt it, if we damaged it, it could recover, and that it was stronger that man ever was. Her thinking changed around the 1950s after she realized man's ability to alter and destroy the natural world with nuclear weapons. Her call is even more urgent today with ozone depletion, the greenhouse effect, acid rain, genetic engineering - we really do have the power on so many fronts to alter the natural world, and to destroy it very quickly.
What do you think people see in her still?
I think people see a role model. The word courage is the one I would come up with again. It's much easier to be quiet, to stay in the background and not stick your neck out. But people identify with her call to be courageous. She had a quote from Abraham Lincoln that seemed to push her, that she returned to when she was tempted to give up: "To sin by silence when they should protest makes cowards out of men." We see this lone, very private, middle-aged woman driving herself to make a public stand and it gives us the courage to speak out. That's what she does for me.
What has she meant to your own children?
Well, there's a funny answer to that. Why is mommy still in her room? For four years they gave me yellow pads and pencils for birthdays and Christmas because I don't type, and since I had never written anything and I didn't know what I was trying to say, I just kept writing and throwing away and writing and throwing away.
They know very deeply what Rachel Carson means to me and I don't think they would ever be able to hear her name, or anything she wrote, without associating it with me. Since they were little, whether it was teaching them about fairies in the woods, feeding the birds, or gardening, many of the gestures I have shared with them I learned from my mother. This is where Rachel Carson's life and mine intersect, and my kids know that, and I certainly hope and believe they will carry those traditions on.
What is most significant to you about her legacy, about her gift to posterity, and what about her is most important to pass on?
The last speech of the play is about two things, reality and wonder, and they go hand in hand. I think what's important to pass on is 'a sense of wonder,' what is beautiful and awe-inspiring. And to be very clear about the realities - the air, water, soil, seeds. Rachel Carson gave us a vision of the Universe and man's place in it. She detailed the complex interrelatedness of all life and warned us against our myopic thinking. Her legacy is in the Universe's infinite beauty, to find joy and wonder in its magnificent complexity, and to proceed very cautiously with our new-found powers which ultimately have the power to alter and destroy the world as we know it.
The actress turns back toward the set. Boxes lie about waiting to be packed, but she is drawn instead to an enormous desk piled high with books and papers. She sits down carefully and begins to write. Her words flow onto the page and out to our ears, words sharing an intimate discovery about the monarch butterfly, words that make us suddenly notice the transformation before our eyes: Rachel Carson, 'mother of the age of ecology', is at her desk writing a letter to a friend.
Rachel Carson's mother bequeathed to her a love for the natural world and reverence for all forms of life, a passion Miss Carson first directed toward studies of marine biology and zoology, later toward her sea-inspired natural history writing, and finally toward warning the public about the dangers of toxic chemicals. After seeing Kaiulani Lee embody this remarkable legacy in A Sense of Wonder I spoke with her in a telephone interview to discuss this unforgettable play, and why and how she is bringing Rachel Carson to life for audiences across the country.
S.M.: How did you first hear about Rachel Carson?
K.L.: She was a point of reference for me as a child because my family is from Maine and she summered just up the coast. When planes flew over spraying insecticides to get rid of mosquitoes, her name always came up. Later, as a teenager and in my early 20's, I read her sea books and loved them. I was not what you would call a student of science but she taught me that I could understand sea life, ant that my love could be enhanced by being able to name what I saw.
Why was it important for you to write this play and become this person?
When I initially set out to do something in defense of the natural world, I didn't know it was going to be about Rachel Carson. It was my husband who said, why reinvent the wheel, why don't you go back and reread Rachel Carson. I had never read Silent Spring, so I started there and was horrified. For the first time I was really disappointed with my parents, their friends, that whole generation for having had all this information and doing nothing about it. I thought grown-ups were supposed to fix things. I had this childish response of outrage that the world had gone on and ignored this information at everybody's peril, at everything's peril, and then there was this sudden revelation: I'm the grown-up now, I'm the parent, and I better do something. It was really that simple. It was like big sock in the face.
Then I started to work on the play; I already felt a strong connection with Miss Carson. The more I read her articles, her letters, her journal entries, the more I saw she articulated much of what I felt. The profound mysteries of life are all around us in the natural world, and in its destruction I believe we lose some part of our connection with the divine. In the world we seem to be creating today, the paving over of the natural world, I don't find a place there, there's no breath there, there's no center, no heart.
As a mother and teacher, I have a sense that kids today are separated from nature. When I asked my children's classmates what their experience was with nature, one young boy said Little League. This was not the answer I expected or wanted. I feel that unless we give kids a sense of this world bigger than themselves, bigger than mankind, unless we introduce them to it, unless they are encouraged to participate with it, have a relationship with it, a chance to fall in love with it, they will never defend it. They won't know to because they will think of it as wholly other.
As we become more suburban and urbanized, there is less and less of a connection with the natural world. I think it is urgent that we scrape up some of this asphalt and introduce our children to this larger concept of the world, where man is only a part of the puzzle, albeit an integral and important part. The reason I wrote the play was to reach out to this next generation and to inspire our own generation to take responsibility for guiding them.
You chose the closing years of Rachel Carson's life as the time period of your play. Why did you pick this particular part of her life?
Almost everybody who has heard of Miss Carson knows of her through Silent Spring. They know of her as an advocate, but I thought it was very important to introduce her as a human being, to show how she became the writer of Silent Spring. She always hoped to be remembered for her love of the natural world and I believe that it was that love that forced her to write Silent Spring. I think of Act 1 as poetic, as memory, as she sifts through her relationships with people and place. Then Act 2 brings us right up to the present and tries to take the audience through the Calvary of writing Silent Spring. I didn't want to start with her as the heroine, as the advocate, I wanted to start with the beauty and the sense of wonder, which I believe was what gave her the courage and commitment to be the advocate.
What were some of the important changes she helped bring about?
She brought to our attention our misuse and overuse of chemical pesticides, but that was small, that wasn't her field of interest even. By attacking that particular issue she engaged in a larger argument about man's inability to destroy the natural world, and she focused our attention on the underbelly of our highly industrialized, technological society.
We were all being taught from the 1950's on about the wonders of these new technologies, of what we would be able to accomplish, of how they were going to free us up, how they were going to give us more power and control, but nobody talked about the risks. Rachel Carson brought up the shadow and put light to it, saying everything has a cost and everything is interrelated. The tangible things happened soon after her death, after the Congressional hearings - DDT was banned, numerous environmental protection laws were passed, including the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, and NEPA, and the EPA was created. There is a direct corollary between Silent Spring, the first Congressional hearings, and all that followed.
What is it you most want people to know about Rachel Carson and carry with them after seeing your play?
I think her courage is unbelievable. She had no old boy network, she was poor, she was very ill, had no funds, no grant, no sponsor, a lawsuit threatened against her, and she was attempting something incredibly controversial in the writing of Silent Spring. She knew the book was going to evoke fury. The information coming to her from scientists and field workers and doctors all over the world was incredibly pessimistic. She was pooling all this information that had never been looked at as a whole, and the outcome looked dismal. I think it was incredibly depressing to her. Not only did she have no backing, little support within the scientific community, but the Department of Agriculture was going to be furious, and it was part of her own government where she had worked for 16 years.
She didn't want to write the book. She wanted to write a book about children and nature, but she felt compelled to. In one of her letters, she wrote about no longer being able to watch the birds and enjoy nature without speaking out about what she knew. She was psychologically courageous, physically courageous, and she put everything on the line. I think her strength is a very simple story about a woman who loves the natural world and has the courage to fight in its defense. It is my hope that her courage and sense of wonder will comfort us and send us out into nature to participate, to play, to be entangled in the mysteries. As I said earlier, I believe it will be through falling in love with nature that we will make the commitment to defend it.
How did you research writing this play?
I interviewed over a dozen people who had been part of her life - friends, family, co-workers. I read everything that I could find. I started with her books, went to the Library of congress, read her articles, her writings for Fish and Wildlife. Meanwhile I read Paul Brooks' book about her, The House of Life. He was her editor and publisher at Houghton Mifflin; he did the Sea Around Us and Silent Spring, and was very close to her. I met him and worked with him for about 3 ½ years. He guided me and supported me and every time I thought I should give up, he pushed me forward. One day he sent me a quote of Miss Carson's, which is in the play, "I believe that the subject chooses the writer; it's not the other way around." I couldn't have written the play without Paul Brooks' help.
For more than 30 years you have played many roles on and off Broadway and television, how does the playing of Rachel Carson fit in or contrast with other work you have done?
It is totally different and it is the most difficult. The day of performance I worry that I am not going to be able to do it. I have been doing the play for over 7 years and each time it scares me that I am not going to be able to make the transformation. Theater, like all art forms, is created through craft and I have years of study and performance that have not only helped me to create the play, but that act as a safety net around me in performance, but in this party the actual transformation from me to Miss Carson feels like free fall. I let go and Miss Carson comes in, and I have never had that experience before.
How is it fulfilling for you?
It is unimaginable. The elation after a performance is extraordinary. I love the silence during the play as the audience is really listening, and the resounding ovation at the end lets me know they really got it. The audience is always deeply moved by her story.
What types of audiences request your performance?
I do a lot of shows at universities for science, environmental studies, and English departments (she won the national book award, she was a magnificent writer), as well as for philosophy, religion, drama, rhetoric, and women's studies programs. I'm delighted so many different departments request it; it almost defines interdisciplinary. I am also doing more and more shows for conferences, large meetings, the Society of Environmental Journalists, groups of science teachers, conservation groups, the Sierra Club Centennial, Fish and Wildlife, and museums. I'm amazed at the variety of requests.
After your performance is over, you come back onstage as yourself and answer questions from the audience about Rachel Carson. Can you share some of the questions and comments that have arisen?
The audience always wants to know if Roger is okay. Roger is her great-nephew who she adopts and raises, and he has a large presence in the play. They also want to know how I came to write the play, what my connection to Ms. Carson is, what she would think of the state of things today, what she would think about our use of pesticides, of terminator seeds, of BGH. Different audiences bring in different specifics, but they want to know whether she would be discouraged, and where she would tell us to go today. They want to know if there has been another book or another author who has carried on in her tradition.
Sometimes the questions and discussions go on for a full hour or more and turn to local concerns. Sometimes the audience asks personal questions about her because they know I have had access to so much material. The question and answer period is always a wonderful exchange; I love it.
In her last year, Ms. Carson fulfilled a life-long dream to visit the Muir Woods when she was out in California accepting an award. Do you have a sense of why this was so important to her?
I mention it in the play because anybody who is a staunch environmentalist or a lover of nature tries to spend as much time as they can seeing the beautiful things of this world. Here was a woman we consider one of the heads of our environmental tradition, and she got to see so little. Her short life was too full of work and family responsibilities to enable her to see some of nature's magnificent sights, but she went on daily walks and did bird watching when she had time, and learned to see nature's beauty in the woods around her house, along the coasts of Maine, and certainly, in the sea.
Do you feel you have been changed by entering into Rachel Carson's world; are you different now than when you first began playing this role?
A life change has happened, but it's not from playing the role. It was in the writing of the play. I had no idea this would happen, but it is as if I found my voice, as if I defined what it was I believed.
There comes a time in life, and I certainly felt it in her life, when you wonder what your obligation is as a human being, whether it's to live as you believe life should be lived in harmony with the world around you, in a community, building up that community, and/or if there is a larger ill that's infesting, is your obligation to be a warrior, to be a soldier and go out and fight those battles which let you live the life you believe you should be living.
When I'm touring the show, I wonder, would it be better to be stationary in a community, would it be better for my soul to be farming, and my questions mirror Ms. Carson's own struggle between wanting to just live what she believed and being a public advocate, the private versus the public call. I think the answer for me, for now, is in the balance, in doing both as best I can.
Why is it important to bring Rachel Carson alive today?
When I started writing and researching, all of her books except for Silent Spring were out of print, and now they are all back in print, so that in itself is thrilling. We might have lost her, and that is frightening to think and makes me wonder who we have lost, what ideas we have lost.
One of the reasons she will stay famous is because she changed nature writing forever - the traditional role of the naturalist was to record what they saw. She did this with her sea books, but by the time she wrote Silent Spring it was more than that: She became an advocate. She had always felt that nature was so large and so powerful that if we hurt it, if we damaged it, it could recover, and that it was stronger that man ever was. Her thinking changed around the 1950s after she realized man's ability to alter and destroy the natural world with nuclear weapons. Her call is even more urgent today with ozone depletion, the greenhouse effect, acid rain, genetic engineering - we really do have the power on so many fronts to alter the natural world, and to destroy it very quickly.
What do you think people see in her still?
I think people see a role model. The word courage is the one I would come up with again. It's much easier to be quiet, to stay in the background and not stick your neck out. But people identify with her call to be courageous. She had a quote from Abraham Lincoln that seemed to push her, that she returned to when she was tempted to give up: "To sin by silence when they should protest makes cowards out of men." We see this lone, very private, middle-aged woman driving herself to make a public stand and it gives us the courage to speak out. That's what she does for me.
What has she meant to your own children?
Well, there's a funny answer to that. Why is mommy still in her room? For four years they gave me yellow pads and pencils for birthdays and Christmas because I don't type, and since I had never written anything and I didn't know what I was trying to say, I just kept writing and throwing away and writing and throwing away.
They know very deeply what Rachel Carson means to me and I don't think they would ever be able to hear her name, or anything she wrote, without associating it with me. Since they were little, whether it was teaching them about fairies in the woods, feeding the birds, or gardening, many of the gestures I have shared with them I learned from my mother. This is where Rachel Carson's life and mine intersect, and my kids know that, and I certainly hope and believe they will carry those traditions on.
What is most significant to you about her legacy, about her gift to posterity, and what about her is most important to pass on?
The last speech of the play is about two things, reality and wonder, and they go hand in hand. I think what's important to pass on is 'a sense of wonder,' what is beautiful and awe-inspiring. And to be very clear about the realities - the air, water, soil, seeds. Rachel Carson gave us a vision of the Universe and man's place in it. She detailed the complex interrelatedness of all life and warned us against our myopic thinking. Her legacy is in the Universe's infinite beauty, to find joy and wonder in its magnificent complexity, and to proceed very cautiously with our new-found powers which ultimately have the power to alter and destroy the world as we know it.
