70 Scientific American, December 2021
RECOMMENDED
Edited by Amy Brady
Illustration by London LaddRachel
Carson:
The Sea
Trilogy.
Edited by Sandra
Steingraber.
Library of
America,
2021 ($40)Before Rachel Carson wrote Silent Spring
in 1962—a literary masterpiece and founda-
tion of the modern environmental move-
ment—she was a marine biologist and a pro-
lific writer on the subject of the ocean.
C arson first made her name with a trilogy of
best-selling books about the sea, published
between 1941 and 1955, books in which she
exhibited her distinctive synthesis of com-
plex science and lyrical landscape writing so
rich and descriptive that it verges, at times,
on the spiritual.
Republished this winter as a single tome
by the Library of America, Carson’s Sea Tril-
ogy is as gratifying to read today as it ever
was; the science, once cutting-edge, may be
long surpassed, but much of it will still be
new to the lay reader. Each book achieves
that rare feat of popular science: crafting a
narrative so deceptively simple as to entice
readers in and, once there, enchant them
enough to stay as much for the prose as for
the delicious morsels of data.
Under the Sea-Wind, the first in the
sequence, was C arson’s first published book.
It is unusual and inventive—the flowing,
shape-shifting story line taking the form of a
succession of episodes seen through the
eyes of nonhuman creatures, many of them
named: Blackfoot and Silverbar, two sander-
lings en route to the Arctic; a mackerel called
Scomber; an eel called Anguilla; and so on.
This is a device more often found in chil-
dren’s literature, a signifier of a heavily
anthropomorphized animal world, but Car-
son’s intentions were in the opposite direc-
tion. Later she explained that she “wanted
[her] readers to feel that they were, for a
time, actually living the lives of sea crea-
tures.” Giving them names marks these ani-
mals as the protagonists of their own stories,
subtly shifting the center of gravity away
from human concerns and tempting us into
investing more fully in the lives of other spe-
cies. (Readers even take the perspective of
the tattered tundra wildflowers at the close
of the summer: “No more need of bright
petals... so cast them off... let the leaves
fall, too, and the stalks wither away.... ”)
The book was well received by critics
but did not sell—and a few weeks after pub-
lication, Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor in
December 1941 ensured that all else was
pushed away from public attention. Among
many things, it was a difficult time to be
making your debut as a writer—something
many pandemic-published authors can
understand—and Carson faded back into
obscurity as her ambitions were overtaken
for a decade by her job at the Bureau of Fish-
eries (later the U. S. Fish and Wildlife Ser vice)
and the needs of her family, where she was
the sole earner supporting her aging mother
and two motherless nieces.
When finally she published The Sea
Around Us in 1951, her persistence was
rewarded. It shot into the best-seller charts
and stayed there for 86 weeks. This second
book took a more conventional form—a
sweeping natural history of the ocean—and
offered accessible summaries of what wasthen the forefront of oceanographic science
(fathograms, sonic sounding, hydrophonic
recordings) while never losing that sense of
almost mystical veneration for the
interconnectedness of all things. “ What hap-
pens to a diatom in the upper, sunlit strata of
the sea may well determine what happens to
a cod lying on a ledge of some rocky canyon
a hundred fathoms below, or to a bed of
multicolored, gorgeously plumed seaworms
carpeting an underlying shoal, or to a prawn
creeping over the sof t oozes of the sea floor
in the blackness of mile-deep water.”
This sentence is typical of Carson’s style:
at once exact and expressive, with that same
sense of zoomed-out , joined-up thinking that
would later enable her to connect the dispa-
rate dots of the research into DDT as it ex ist-
ed in piecemeal form in the 1950s and 1960s.
The Sea Around Us was met with a rap-
turous reception and propelled Carson to lit-
erary celebrity. It is not hard to see why: the
book is packed with captivating detail, and
on almost ever y page one finds a passage of
uncommon beauty. The dated science does
not detract from one’s enjoyment; if any-
thing, it adds to it because it allows the
reader to look afresh at the ocean and see it
once more from a place of greater igno-
rance. Oh God, as the Breton prayer goes:
Thy sea is so great, and my boat is so small.
The ocean summoned up in The Sea
Around Us is an alien world, where “strange
and fantastic” creatures lurk in its darkest
recesses, their “eyes atrophied or abnor-
mally large, their bodies studded with phos-
phorescent organs.” It is a place where mists
of plankton swirl through shafts of sea-
green light, where flying squid hurl them-
selves onto the decks of passing vessels. To
read it is to confront how we have coexisted
alongside a vast realm almost unknown
beyond our own small circle of light.
Carson tells us of the amazement felt by
the crew of the Bulldog in 1860, when a
sounding line was brought up from a depth
of 1260 fathoms—a depth then suspected to
be entirely devoid of life—with 13 star fish
clinging to it. It was as if a space shuttle were
now to return to Earth with unexpected
stowaways onboard: “The deep has sent
forth the long coveted message,” as the
ship’s naturalist recorded it at the time.
There was a whole other world down there.
We learn of the discover y in 1946 of the
detection by echo sounding of a “phantomNONFICTION
Oceans of Enchantment
A marine biologist who wrote poetically of the sea
Review by Cal Flyn