Under the Sea-wind: A Naturalist's Picture of Ocean Life

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According to environmental engineer and Carson scholar H. Patricia Hynes, "Silent Spring altered the balance of power in the world. No one since would be able to sell pollution as the necessary underside of progress so easily or uncritically." Sunbathing bores me, I'm too old to build sandcastles, and I neither swim nor surf. For me, the inevitable summertime trip to the beach is not about any of these things; it's an opportunity to inhabit, however briefly, the margin where land and sea engage in a constant, ever-changing relationship that is one of the great drivers of life on, and the life of, the planet. It's a zone of interchange between the three great planetary ecosystems of earth, air and ocean and one which played a crucial role in the evolution of life itself. A trip to the seaside is an opportunity to contemplate the sea in all its multifaceted glory.

To sense this world of waters known to the creatures of the sea we must shed our human perceptions of length and breadth and time and place, and enter vicariously into a universe of all-pervading water. North Pacific Giant Octopus by photographer Mark Laita from his project Sea The thump of specificity here, giving the skimmer its Latinate genus name Rynchops, is welcome, after all the anonymity preceding it. The unidentified bird may seem “strange” at first, but with its nesting grounds nearby, this is clearly its habitat. Note how it arrives with the dusk, i.e., it behaves in concert with or response to the waning light, and its steady “progress” across the sound is analogous—“as measured and as meaningful”—as that of the shadows. What may be meaningful in the skimmer’s flight, in other words, is similarly meaningful in the steadily changing shadows. There is a stately persistence here, a sense of unwa­vering purpose, in this measured and unhurried movement. Note too that we are invited to measure the skimmer’s wingspread, “more than the length of a man’s arm,” against our own—yet a further unobtrusive but inescapable analogy. If I read these passages as if they were poetry, that is because they are. Is wonder still possible, given our climate crisis? Wonder implies some degree of leisure and time; it requires slow, sustained, and contemplative attention—a luxury that, perhaps, we can no longer afford. Even Carson, when she wrote the new preface for the revised 1961 edition of The Sea Around Us, couldn’t help but inject an urgent warning about the practice of dumping nuclear waste into the ocean. She called the previous assurance that the sea was so large as to be inviolate a “naive” belief. Today, as dire emergencies unfold, rationalizing time spent merely appreciating the natural world seems even more difficult. During the COP26 climate conference, protesters held up signs spelling doom and chanted: “If not now, when? When?” Greta Thunberg summarily declared the conference a failure, dismissing it as a meaningless PR event for “beautiful speeches.”Her style is as readable as that in any animal story, but without most of the anthropomorphism of which so many writers are guilty. She has tried to present the activities of typical oceanic animals from what may be imagined to be their point of view. The story manages the most delicate of balances imaginable; it shows us the danger, savagery and fury of the natural Atlantic world, fish and birds die, hunting and predation are not sugar coated in any way, but the telling is so meticulous that reading the ways of the sea is at worst bitter sweet and it never becomes depressing. Another tactic of the author is to give us one or two 'characters' to follow through the story. This is masterly, because much as I love reading about marine life, following an individual lets one immerse in the story rather than feeling as though one is reading a textbook. Sandra Steingraber, editor, is senior scientist at the Science & Environmental Health Network and one of America’s leading environmental writers and anti-pollution advocates. Her books include Living Downstream: An Ecologist’s Personal Investigation of Cancer and the Environment (1997), Having Faith: An Ecologist’s Journey to Motherhood (2001), and Raising Elijah: Protecting Our Children in an Age of Environmental Crisis (2011). Long before scientists like pioneering oceanographer Sylvia “Her Deepness” Earle plunged into the depths of the ocean, Carson shepherds the human imagination to the mysterious wonderland thriving below the surface of the seas that envelop Earth:

If Melville’s iambics can be heard in passages such as this, I think it’s because Carson’s sense of awe and wonder—her vision of the ocean’s epic magnificence—came from essentially the same sources. A passage like this deserves to be studied alongside Modernist poems by Stevens and Bishop; it is surely a meditation on artifice in nature and who—or what—creates it. But I think Carson’s curiosity—and her feeling of wonder—often surpasses theirs. Famed as a scientist whose timely book on chemical poisons had served as a warning to the world about the insatiable nature of corporate greed, she was at the same time an important writer, one of the finest nature writers of her century. And it is for her literary excellence, not her cry of warning, that in the end, she may be best remembered. After a tour of some of the ocean’s most unusual and dazzling creatures, Carson considers the glorious and inevitable interconnectedness of the natural world, no different from the “inescapable network of mutuality” which Martin Luther King so passionately championed in the human world. She writes: a b Arvidson, Adam Regn (26 September 2011). "Nature Writing in America: The Power of Rachel Carson".

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If you cannot open a .mobi file on your mobile device, please use .epub with an appropriate eReader. Rachel Carson--pioneering environmentalist and author of Silent Spring--opens our eyes to the wonders of the natural world in her groundbreaking paean to the sea. Part Three River and Sea is written in the deepest, darkest, fathoms, we follow Anguilla, the eel from the far tributaries of a coastal river pool, downstream to the gently sloping depths of the sea, ‘the steep descent of the continental slopes and finally the abyss’. Rachel Carson, writer, scientist, and ecologist, grew up simply in the rural river town of Springdale, Pennsylvania. Her mother bequeathed to her a life-long love of nature and the living world that Rachel expressed first as a writer and later as a student of marine biology. Carson graduated from Pennsylvania College for Women (now Chatham University) in 1929, studied at the Woods Hole Marine Biological Laboratory, and received her MA in zoology from Johns Hopkins University in 1932.

In each example all the details—colors, light, impressions, images, even metaphors—come from the creatures who are there watching, not from the author directly. We are asked to imagine what they see. The next chapter presents an extended scene observed by gulls whose “eyes missed nothing”: I was stunned, for example, by her account of how the molten earth’s atmosphere cooled and produced centuries of rain (“The Gray Beginnings”), by her bleak visions of the ocean’s deepest abysses, drained of all color and utterly hostile to life (“The Sunless Sea” and “The Long Snowfall”), by her many chapters of marine history—oceanic navigation since the Phoenicians—as well as by her sense of undersea topography as a mirror of what we see and measure above sea level, except that its “mountains” and “valleys” are much taller, deeper, and more mysterious (“Hidden Lands”). Again and again, it’s Carson’s language that makes these visionary landscapes unforgettable. Then too she increases her credibility with frequent admissions of fallibility:Celebrating the mystery and beauty of birds and sea creatures in their natural habitat, Under the Sea-Wind —Rachel Carson’s first book and her personal favorite—is the early masterwork of one of America’s greatest nature writers. Evoking the special mystery and beauty of the shore and the open sea—its limitless vistas and twilight depths—Carson’s astonishingly intimate, unforgettable portrait captures the delicate negotiations of an ingeniously calibrated ecology. Editor’s note: To celebrate Women’s History Month, expatalachians will publish a series of stories focusing on Appalachian women throughout March.

Rachel Carson: The Sea Trilogy is kept in print by a gift to the Guardians of American Letters Fund from The Gould Family Foundation, which also provided project support for the volume. A variety of groups ranging from government institutions to environmental and conservation organizations to scholarly societies have celebrated Carson's life and work since her death. Perhaps most significantly, on June 9, 1980, Carson was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian honor in the United States. A 17¢ Great Americans series postage stamp was issued in h Rachel Carson—pioneering environmentalist and author of Silent Spring—opens our eyes to the wonders of the natural world in her groundbreaking paean to the sea. During her 15-year career in federal service, Carson found the time to research and write a variety of nature writings. Her literary side-hustle supported her family and eventually allowed her to move to Maine in 1953 to concentrate on writing full-time. In 1957 she began writing Silent Spring.Although the bodies of the shrimp were transparent they appeared to the gulls like a cloud of moving red dots . . . Now in the darkness these spots glowed with a strong phosphorescence as the shrimp darted about in the waters of the cove, mingling their fires with the steely green flashes of the ctenophores [comb jellies] . . . Carson’s journey to acclaimed author and environmentalist started with humble beginnings. She was born in a cabin in Springdale, Pennsylvania, just outside Pittsburgh, in 1907. Inclined to academics, Carson attended Pennsylvania College for Women (today Chatham University) in 1925 to study English before changing to biology. Her excellent marks secured her a full scholarship for a master’s degree in zoology at Johns Hopkins University. In Part One, Edge of the Sea, written for the life of the shore, and inspired by a stretch of North Carolina sea-coast, we meet a female sanderling she names Silverbar, it is Spring and the great Spring migration of shore birds is at its height and concludes with the end of summer where the movements of birds, fish, shrimp and other water creatures heralds the changing of the seasons. Recognized globally for her writing, Rachel Carson’s work has shaped environmental policy and imaginations worldwide. The book Silent Spring made Carson a household name, though it was not her first work. Published in 1962, Silent Spring was groundbreaking, detailing the negative impacts of synthetic pesticides, namely DDT, on the environment.