Rachel Carson’s Love for the Sea

Her lesser-known books are worth the read

When most people think of Rachel Carson (1907–1964), they think of her groundbreaking work Silent Spring which is largely credited for helping to launch the environmental movement and through which she is often said to have “saved the birds.”

This “battle cry” book urging us to take a closer look at the use of chemical pesticides led to regulations and restrictions still in place today and the eventual establishment of the Environmental Protection Agency.

But what I know and love Rachel Carson for best is her book, The Sea Around Us, in which she speaks of the ocean in eloquent prose and through which she tells the story of the evolution of biological life on this planet.

“It was not until the Silurian time, some 350 million years ago, that the first pioneer of land life crept out on the shore. It was an arthropod, one of the great tribe that later produced crabs and lobsters and insects. It must have been something like a modern scorpion, but, unlike some of its descendants, it never wholly severed the ties that united it to the sea. It lived a strange life, half terrestrial, half-aquatic, something like that of the ghost crabs that speed along the beaches today, now and then dashing into the surf to moisten their gills”(12).

This book is so delicious I want to sleep with it under my pillow and dream with it all night long. Written like poetry, a love song to the ocean and to the creativity of creation, it tells our history. This is a brilliant book and it changed my life and the way I position myself in the world forever.

It is a praise song to the planet and Mother Sea.

“The deep sea has its stars, and perhaps here and there an eerie and transient equivalent of moonlight, for the mysterious phenomenon of luminescence is displayed by perhaps half of all the fishes that live in dimly lit or darkened waters, and by many of the lower forms as well. Many fishes carry luminous torches that can be turned on or off at will, presumably helping them find or pursue their prey. Others have rows of lights over their bodies, in patterns that vary from species to species and may be a sort of recognition mark or badge by which the bearer can be known as friend or enemy. The deep-sea squid ejects a spurt of fluid that becomes a luminous cloud, the counterpart of the ‘ink’ of his shallow-water relative”(50).

Carson’s voice in this book inspired me to try to write of the natural world in a similar way, a way that makes the reader feel their own embeddedness in this story, their own awe at being part of this magnificent Earth story and their own feeling of belonging.

It changed the way I walk at the beach, and in the forest, the way I consider myself and my own history. Yes, my ancestors are these creatures that slowly manifested biological life in the early briny sea, the same way my body was formed in the briny waters of my mother’s inner sea. Invertebrates, cephalopods, arthropods, amphibians, reptiles, warm-blooded birds and mammals — ancestors all. I honor them.

“When they went ashore, the animals that took up a land life carried with them a part of the sea in their bodies, a heritage which they passed on to their children and which even today links each land animal with its origin in the ancient sea. Fish, amphibian, and reptile, warm-blooded bird and mammal — each of us carries in our veins a salty stream in which the elements sodium, potassium, and calcium are combined in almost the same proportions as in sea water”(13).

Before publishing Silent Spring, Carson had published Under the Sea Wind (1941), The Sea Around Us (1952), and The Edge of the Sea (1955). Previous to that she was editor in chief of all publications of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Silent Spring was published in 1962 in response to the rise of the chemical industry after WWII.

Above all Rachel Carson was a scientist: A Marine biologist. It matters that she was a woman scientist in the 1950s writing with authority and giving this kind of expression to the planet and our relationship to it. It is a woman’s voice: the voice of a woman scientist speaking for and about the Earth, speaking of its oneness, its wholeness, its connectedness.

The Sea Around Us remains a stunning and beautiful read.

© Theresa C. Dintino

Works Cited

Carson, Rachel L. The Sea Around Us, (Oxford University Press, 1989)