A special Aqua Aficionado...

Rachel Louise Carson (27 May 1907 – 14 April 1964) was a Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania-born zoologist and marine biologist whose landmark book, Silent Spring, is often credited with having launched the global environmental movement. Silent Spring had an immense effect in the United States, where it spurred a reversal in national pesticide policy.
(from the Free Dictionary By Farlex - click here for the original)

I own the second most famous book that Mrs Carson published - and the reason why she is such an Aqua Aficionado - "The Sea Around Us" (the 1951 original edition, no less) - a tome that revisited familiar ground for Mrs. Carson which she had thoroughly and extensively written about in 1937's "Undersea" and 1941's "Under The Sea Wind" - 1941, year of Aquaman's birth! Mrs. Carson's own birthyear, 1907, makes her a contemporary of John Wayne (who is her senior by a single day too, as their birthdays follow each other...!)

Aye - both giants in their respective field as well as Katharine Hepburn, Robert A. Heinlein, Fay Wray, L. Sprague de Camp, Barbara Stanwyck, Oscar Niemeyer, Daphne du Maurier, Red Sox legend Jimmie Foxx, Frida Kahlo, Rosalind Russell, Pierre Mendès-France, Milton Caniff, Peggy Ashcroft, Kate Smith, Alexander Knox, Peter Fleming, Dorothy West, Baltasar Lopes da Silva, José Reis, Dora Maar, Joan Harrison and numerous other luminaries - all of these would have been centenarians this year!

To get back to our aqua aficionado of the CENTURY, hence, she was -in her living years- a beautiful lady inside as outside. She is forevermore the voice of reason and the conscience of a planet so often without any sort of grasp upon either concept... Regardless of specific evils she was most adamantly against, her voice made people care about nature - and such a voice needed to be heard exactly when it was; at the heart of the 20th Century, the most destructive and wasteful century of all (up until now). It is thanks to Rachel Carson that some started paying attention and caring about the environment way before the damage was done and pernicious effects like global warming began to be felt across the world. Alas, not enough paid attention to the warning that Rachel Carson gave us all, way back then - and the damage to the planet's eco-system was perpetrated anyway. A visionary with GREAT wisdom and foresight, the kindhearted and poetic Rachel Carson is, by far, the greatest of all the luminaries who could have turned 100 years of age this year - if they were "still with us", as the saying goes...!

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