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

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Much more—one beautiful passage after another, in fact—might be quoted from this chapter as it rises to its peroration—tide pools have very nearly taken over the whole book. And why not? So many of Carson’s deepest reflections are here.

The grebe soon drowned. Its body hung limply from the net, along with a score of silvery fish bodies with heads pointing upstream in the direction of the spawning grounds where the early-run shad awaited their coming. Horned Grebe. Via Wikimedia. Under the Sea Wind by Rachel Carson was the noted naturalist’s first book, published in 1942. Even in her debut publication, reviewers noted the lyrical quality she applied to scientific prose to make it compelling and readable. 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: 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’.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. With just four books in her lifetime — her sea trilogy and Silent Spring — Rachel Carson set the standard for environmental writing in the twentieth century. This is Carson's first book, published inauspiciously in 1941, and not read much at all until the success of her later work. Somewhat unfortunately, the enormous success and enduring impact of Silent Spring has overshadowed her earlier sea trilogy, and the second volume in the trilogy, The Sea Around Us, is more widely read than the other two volumes, which includes this book and The Edge of the Sea. This is a shame, because Under the Sea Wind is a dazzling achievement as a riveting account of life along North America's east coast.

Why did Carson feel so strongly the need to proselytize the wonders of wonder? Perhaps she sensed that, without it, an emotional connection with nature would be impossible; without it, the environmental movement had no hope. “The more clearly we can focus our attention on the wonders and realities of the universe,” she once said, “the less taste we shall have for the destruction of our race.” Today, we remember Carson for her crusading spirit and moral clarity; we cite Silent Spring as an example of a political book that spurred public outrage and prodded the government toward action. However, we far less frequently remember Carson for this other thing she spent her whole life doing: helping the public cultivate a sense of awe about nature. To see this facet of her sensibility most clearly, we need to return to her first three books— The Sea Trilogy. In “The Art of Fiction” (1884), James wrote, “The only obligation to which in advance we may hold a novel . . . is that it be interesting.” I f Carson’s sea books can serve a “utilitarian” purpose today, guesses Sandra Steingraber, an environmental activist and the editor of the new Sea Trilogy edition, they mark a “disappearing natural baseline” that describes “how the all-creating ocean functioned, how its creatures lived and interacted.” As I read, I noted, sadly, all the past-tense verbs in that sentence. Is it already too late to know the sea as Carson once did? In her introduction, Steingraber goes on to list the currently unfolding catastrophes that Carson never lived to see: “industrial overfishing, or news of the potential collapse of the Gulf Stream, or massive floating garbage patches, or icebergs the size of states breaking off Antarctica, or micro-plastics replacing plankton in the water column, or plans for deep-sea mining.” To that list one might add ocean acidification, hypoxic dead zones, sonar testing, and coral die-off. Steingraber strains for some silver lining: “But her words fortify us for battles” and—she sums things up waveringly—“inspire curiosity and care about what we are in the process of losing.” Meanwhile the fish, drained of life by separation from water, grew limp as all its struggles ceased. Like a mist gathering on a clear glass surface, a film clouded its eyes. Soon the iridescent greens and golds that made its body, in life, a thing of beauty had faded to dullness. As I was finishing this book I was reflecting on how much of Carson's writing I found familiar - and then it dawned on me just how much of the world does not live close to the coast; how many people have never witnessed anything she describes first-hand. To them this book must feel like reading a piece of science fiction describing another world.Though Carson had never seen the sea herself, she threw herself into its study. She studied biology, then zoology, eventually taking a job as a writer for the U.S. Bureau of Fisheries. All of this was incredibly rare for a young woman in the 1920s and ’30s, but Carson’s trajectory was a demonstration of the expansive potential of curiosity. It also reflected the tireless tutelage of her mother, Maria, who had instilled a love of the wild in her children by regularly taking them on walks to learn about botany and birds. Carson absorbed these lessons and, throughout her life, maintained a deep conviction that wonder had to be at the foundation of any relationship with nature.

Hedgpeth, Joel (March 1956). "Review: Under the Sea Wind. A Naturalist's Picture of Ocean Life. by Rachel L. Carson". The Quarterly Review of Biology. 31: 40–41. doi: 10.1086/401182– via JSTOR.Some would linger in the river estuaries . . . But the females would press on, swimming up against the currents of the rivers. They would move swiftly and by night as their mothers had come down the rivers. Their columns, miles in length, would wind up along the shallows. . . . No hardship and no obstacle would deter them. They would be preyed upon . . .They would swarm . . . they would squirm. . . . Some would go on for hundreds of miles . . . 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.” 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.

Between 1964 and 1990, 650 acres (3 km2) near Brookeville in Montgomery County, Maryland were acquired and set aside as the Rachel Carson Conservation Park, administered by the Maryland-National Capital Park and Planning Commission. In 1969, the Coastal Maine National Wildlife Refuge became the Rachel Carson National Wildlife Refuge; expansions will bring the size of the refuge to about 9,125 acres (37 km2). In 1985, North Carolina renamed one of its estuarine reserves in honor of Carson, in Beaufort. Upon reading the book one has the feeling of being an invisible spectator of an eternal drama that began million of years ago and which promises to continue indefinitely, heedless of man and his exploitation of the continents. It is the same feeling one achieves when alone on a starry night he gazes upward into the immensity of space. They leave in their wake a cloud of transparent spheres of infinitesimal size, a vast, sprawling river of life, the sea’s counterpart of the river of stars that flows through the sky as the Milky Way. There are known to be hundreds of millions of eggs to the square mile, billions in an area a fishing vessel could cruise over in an hour, hundreds of trillions in the whole spawning area. 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.

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Miss Carson is by training a zoologist; yet, unlike most scientists, she is a talented writer as she so thoroughly proves in this, her first book. A true lover of the sea, she tells with scientific accuracy of the life of the Atlantic coast, from the soaring gulls on high to the forms that creep over the continental slopeand down into the perpetual darkness of the ocean’s abyss. 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] . . . We can only sense that in the deep and turbulent recesses of the sea are hidden mysteries far greater than any we have solved.