Photo courtesy of Davis Spylios Management Award-winning playwright and celebrated actress Kaiulani Lee

In celebration of the United States Fish and Wildlife Service’s National Wildlife Refuge Week (October 13–20), OBIE Award-winning playwright and celebrated actress Kaiulani Lee will perform A Sense of Wonder, a one-woman play based on the life and work of environmental activist and pioneer Rachel Carson, Wednesday, October 17, at 7 pm in Gamble Auditorium. The event, which is being sponsored by Mount Holyoke’s Center for Environmental Literacy and the United States Fish and Wildlife Service, is one of the high points of the Wildlife Service’s annual celebration of the national wildlife refuge system and the birds, animals, plants, habitats, and ecosystems that system works to protect. Lee will answer questions from the audience immediately following the performance.

Written by Lee, A Sense of Wonder portrays Carson before and directly after the publishing of her landmark work, Silent Spring (1962), and focuses on Carson’s love for the natural world and her fight to defend it. A poet, zoologist, and biologist, Carson is first portrayed in her summer home in Maine as she is fighting cancer and preparing to leave the state for what she fears is the last time. We then see Carson two months later, in the wake of the publication of Silent Spring, in which she alerted the world to the dangers of chemical pesticides. She is shown to be battling the chemical industry, the government, and the press to get her message out to Congress and the American people.

Erich Hartmann Magnum Photos Environmental activist and pioneer Rachel Carson

"What Lee achieves in barely an hour is something rare and almost spiritual: She merges herself with Carson’s spirit, fervently voicing both halves of her great message—scientific-aesthetic-emotional testimony to the beauty of the natural world and a prophetic call to its defense," says Christopher Rawson of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

Touring the United States for ten years with productions also in Canada, England, and Italy, A Sense of Wonder has been presented at more than sixty universities and has been the centerpiece of many national conferences on education, the environment, and journalism. It has been performed at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., for the Albert Schweitzer Conference at the United Nations, for the Sierra Club’s centennial, and for the Department of the Interior’s 150th anniversary celebration. It was performed at Mount Holyoke in 1999.

This special presentation of A Sense of Wonder is intended to focus public awareness on the centennial (in 2003) of the founding of the national wildlife refuge system. Displays will be exhibited before and after the show, with Wildlife Service personnel available to discuss them. The United States Fish and Wildlife Service is the principal federal agency responsible for conserving, protecting, and enhancing fish, wildlife, and plants and their habitats for the continuing benefit of the American people. Information about the other events planned for National Wildlife Refuge Week can be found at www.fws.gov.