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

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Stewart, Frank. A Natural History of Nature Writing. Island Press, 1995, p. 170. ISBN 1-55963-279-8. 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. 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. 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.

By giving clear expression to the interrelatedness of land, air, sea and the pull of sun and moon, The Sea Around Us transcends mere nature writing and becomes a work of ecology. This is no accident; Carson is concerned that we take action to protect these delicate ecosystems and realises that to encourage this she needs to help us understand their importance to us and to everything else. Knowledge here is not celebrated just for itself but as a key to what Buddhists might call "right action". Her quiet call to arms is summed up in these words: "It is a curious situation that the sea, from which life first arose, should now be threatened by the activities of one form of that life. But the sea, though changed in a sinister way, will continue to exist; the threat is rather to life itself."Carson continues her marine expedition farther and deeper into the ocean, to return in the final paragraphs to this central interconnectedness of life — perhaps, she poetically suggests, our only real taste of immortality:

The repeated verb would designates what will happen but hasn’t yet (future conditional tense), but it also expresses—after fourteen repeti­tions! —what will happen because of ironclad determination, the inexorable necessity of what must happen. Note how moon and tides and warm spring rains are involved, the whole vernal equinox itself, not the spawning fish alone. Then Carson makes a slight but critical change: would becomes should: Under the Sea-Wind reveals Carson’s literary genius. Through clear language, personification, and vivid description, she brings the ocean to us on land. Under the Sea-Wind is the deepest immersion in the sea without going scuba diving.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.

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.

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 The appeal of The Sea Around Us, written more than seventy years ago, remains strong today, partly because so much of what it describes has changed little—to our eyes, at least—and sometimes not at all. The weeds that grow today in the Sargasso Sea, Carson tells us, are exactly the same plants Columbus saw when he sailed by in 1492. (Interesting, no?) But the book’s critical virtue is not really in its vast subject—how the earth’s ocean was formed, how it generated life as we know it, how its tides and currents and waves determine what grows and evolves, shaping and re-shaping the land it surrounds—but in how Carson writes about it. It doesn’t matter if recent marine science says she got some things “wrong.” Her only obligation, to paraphrase what Henry James once said about the novel, is the obligation to be interesting. [3] She does that unfailingly, I think, nearly all of the time. 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.