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

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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. If you cannot open a .mobi file on your mobile device, please use .epub with an appropriate eReader. In Under the Sea - Wind, Rachel takes us onto a magical journey of the ocean in a way that we will never experience it, she shows us it's seasons, it's rivers and tides, it's restless energy and the struggle of life within the intense world of the ocean. The way she does it is quite unique. 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] . . . Before David Attenborough and nature television, there was Rachel Carson. What's so phenomenal about this 1941 book was that it was her first, published when she was in her mid-30s.

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. T he Sea Around Us has ambitions of a wider scope: It is Carson’s lyrical biography of the ocean (the first word in her alphabetical glossary is “abyss”). Here she hits on a style and form that will more or less characterize all her subsequent books. The chapters are messily arranged by phenomena, build on one another, repeat sentiments, and read as one flowing narrative rather than a collection of distinct essays. The voice is just as florid as in Sea-Wind, but more assured, and Carson puts less distance between herself and the reader, so that she is more like a teacher guiding us through the world than an author constructing one for us. This helps with concepts that are even harder to visualize than eel larvae, like the creation of the world, the rise and fall of islands, and the force of tides. 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.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: 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.” Rachel Carson’s a seminal figure in eco literature, especially for her book Silent Spring. Before being known as a writer, she was a marine biologist with the U.S. Bureau of Fisheries, and she analyzed and reported on fish populations and wrote brochures for the public. In July 1937, the Atlantic Monthly accepted and published an essay titled “Undersea” which her supervisor had turned down for a bureau brochure (it was too good for the purpose). She was then approached by Simon and Schuster to expand and write a full book, and her first book, Under the Sea Wind, published in 1941. 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.”

Nature writing at its best in vivid, lyrical prose. She writes about ocean and shore life so you feel you are there. The reader follows birds, fish, crustaceans and even eel! You follow an interlude in these creatures’ respective lives. It is utterly amazing the extent to which Carson makes the reader feel part of their aquatic existence. Violent storms, dense fog and lulling, lapping seas under blue skies. Predators and prey, the cycle of life to death to food and new life. 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). W hen the marine biologist Rachel Carson was a young girl, she discovered a fossilized shell while hiking around her family’s hillside property in Springdale, Pennsylvania. Those who knew her then would later contend that this relic sparked such intense reverie in her that she instantly felt a tug toward the sea. What was this ancient creature, and what was the world it had known? After 10 years of uneventful river habitation, the eels are drawn by instinct downriver returning to their place of birth, a deep abyss near the Sargasso Sea where they will spawn and die. It is the most remarkable journey, as is that of the newborn spawn originating from two continents, who float side by side and drift towards those same coastal rivers their parents swam from, a voyage of years and over time the two species will separate and veer towards their continent, the US or Europe. Bryson, Michael (2002). Visions of the Land: Science, Literature, and the American Environment from the Era of Exploration to the Age of Ecology (Under the Sign of Nature). Charlottesville,VA: University of Virginia Press. ISBN 0813921074.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. 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”:

Long before coming to the end of The Sea Trilogy, it becomes apparent that Carson has written something more than three individual books, each successful in its own way. They have a design and need to be seen as a sequence: a monumental centerpiece, The Sea Around Us—surely an epic in every sense of the term—flanked by a narrative of departure from the land and going undersea in Under the Sea-Wind, and by a return to the shore, less a narrative than a new personal vision in The Edge of the Sea. The first book begins with a dark coastal picture, all shadows and silvery reflections, and the last book ends with a dazzling array of tide pool pictures, each a microcosm of what surrounds us—distant mountains, the sky above, and water so pure it distills a radiant sunshine. The result is a whole of epic proportions, held together by leitmotifs and themes that steadily recur and echo one another—the bioluminescence of the sea at night, the intersections of death and re-birth, the processes of destruction and renewal, cosmic and geological as well as biological; the endless ambiguities and analogies between land and sea, or time and space, or permanence and change; the paradoxes of seeing and invisibility. Looked at this way, the trilogy has its own ecology, with each part intertwined with and enhanced by all the rest. 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 . . . In detailing a tern’s relationship to the sea (a type of seabird), Carson indirectly and perfectly characterizes the human-sea relationship: 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 her honor the following year; several other countries have since issued Carson postage as well. 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.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.” According to Brooks, Carson requested that a piece of her writing about the sea be read at the funeral. The selection—which ultimately wasn’t read, though it’s not clear why—came from a coda to The Edge of the Sea that’s pure poetic flourish reminiscent of a sermon, which speaks of distant coasts “made one by the unifying touch of the sea” and “the stream of life, flowing as inexorably as any ocean current, from past to unknown future.”