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

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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.

She wrote several other articles designed to teach people about the wonder and beauty of the living world, including "Help Your Child to Wonder," (1956) and "Our Ever-Changing Shore" (1957), and planned another book on the ecology of life. Embedded within all of Carson's writing was the view that human beings were but one part of nature distinguished primarily by their power to alter it, in some cases irreversibly. 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. 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.The island lay in shadows only a little deeper than those that were swiftly stealing across the sound from the east. On its western shore the wet sand of the narrow beach caught the same reflection of palely gleaming sky that laid a bright path across the water from island beach to horizon. Both water and sand were the color of steel overlaid with the sheen of silver, so that it was hard to say where water ended and land began. 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. The essay was a narrative account of the countless sea creatures that cohabit in and underwater and introduced her two most enduring and renowned themes: the ecological relationships of ocean life that have been in existence for millenia and the material immortality that embraces even the tiniest organism. It was the essay that spawned a classic in nature literature. Although famous today for Silent Spring, Rachel Carson had already made her name decades earlier. During the 1930s, as a young zoologist specialising in marine ecology, she helped pay the bills with a series of essays which appeared in newspapers such as the Boston Globe and attracted widespread praise. These led, in turn, to several books about the ocean, of which Under the Sea-Wind was the first. a b c Sullivan, Marnie (2012). Vakoc, Douglas (ed.). Revealing the Radical in Rachel Carson's Three Sea Books. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. pp.75–88.

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. 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.In the Inuktitut language the term for snowy owl is ookpik. In 1963 it was made into a stuffed toy, became wildly popular as a national symbol, and produced several children’s books called “Ookpik the Owl.” Of all her books, Carson’s first, Under the Sea-Wind, reads the most like a collection of fictional stories, yet it features the least human interiority. Its three sections follow a cast of 13 enigmatically named characters (Silverbar the sanderling, Lophius the angler fish, Ookpik the snow owl) and myriad unnamed creatures of the western Atlantic as they fulfill their migratory destinies between the Arctic and the Florida Keys. It is a meticulously researched feat of nature writing told in a roving close third person that assumes the consciousness of its animal characters. Yet there’s nothing so fantastical about it; her animals don’t have language, but they do possess memory, appetites, preferences, ancestries, and enemies.

In 1935, she secured a job at the U.S. Bureau of Fisheries. In her part-time position, Carson created radio program scripts about marine life and wrote brochures for the department. When she submitted a brochure about marine life to the bureau chief, he rejected it, urging her instead to submit it to The Atlantic Monthly. It was the early draft of Undersea, which The Atlantic published and later became Under the Sea-Wind. By 1937, Carson had a full-time position as a biologist at the Bureau of Fisheries. Rachel Carson, 1944. Via Wikimedia. 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." We can only sense that in the deep and turbulent recesses of the sea are hidden mysteries far greater than any we have solved. 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. 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.”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.