Did we think the sea was too big to fail?

Rachel Carson saw the climate crisis coming – and her books now read like the warning we all ignored

The oceans are the living heart and lungs of our planet. They produce most of the oxygen in our atmosphere, and through their circulating currents they control climate. Without healthy oceans, we land-dwelling, air-breathing mid-sized primates will die.

The republication of the marine biologist Rachel Carson’s first three books – Under the Sea-Wind, The Sea Around Us and The Edge of the Sea – marks a new, widespread recognition of these facts. When Carson was writing these books, in America in the late 1930s, the 1940s, and the 1950s, a number of things that are now realities in our world had not yet happened.

There were warning signs, but these warnings were only glimmers. Few were aware that we had entered the age of the Sixth Great Extinction. The nascent climate crisis had not impacted public consciousness. Largescale industrial fishing was just beginning, and the cod stocks of the Grand Banks of Newfoundland had not yet crashed due to overfishing. Other fish populations were not being decimated due to devastating by-catch. The regenerative biosystems of the continental shelves had not yet been wrecked by draggers. The coral reefs were not yet bleaching. “Ghost nets” made of plastic rope were not drifting around in the oceans, entangling and killing fish, dolphins and whales.

No countries had set up marineprotected areas, because why would you need such a thing? Wasn’t the sea an ever-renewing source of bounty, there for humankind’s taking? You didn’t need to pay attention to its ecosystems, because why would you? The sea could take care of itself. It was too big to fail. As Lord Byron said:

Roll on, thou deep and dark blue Ocean – roll!

Ten thousand fleets sweep over thee in vain;

Man marks the earth with ruin – his control

Stops with the shore…

That may have been true in the 19th century, in the age of wooden sailing ships. But today, in the era of oil, plastics, pesticides and rampant industrial overfishing, it is no longer true. If Carson were alive today she would be the first to be underlining the dangers of human ocean-killing.

Carson is a pivotal figure of the 20th century. Those of us who care about preserving a viable planet for its many forms of life – our own species included – would not be where we are without her, and those millions currently suffering from the effects of pollution, from the climate crisis and its associated famines, fires, and floods, and resource wars, would also not be where they are if more decision-makers had listened to her and acted upon her insights.

By “pivotal” I mean that people thought one way before her essential 1962 book, Silent Spring, and they thought another way after it. With great personal courage and with intense stamina – she was dying of cancer at the time – she took on the chemical industry, presenting the destructive effects that the widespread spraying of the popular pesticide DDT was having on natural life, especially birds. (That it was having a similar effect on farmers who had been told it was safe, and were not even wearing protective gear while spraying it, had not yet become apparent.)

Needless to say, Carson was viciously attacked by the industry in every possible way. Reading these attacks now, their misogyny is clear – she was a woman, so was therefore stupid and hysterical. One of the oddest allegations was that because she was unmarried, she must be a “communist”. Throughout all this she stood her ground, and defended her evidence-based conclusions. As we are now living in a new era of science denial and a refusal to accept facts – not only those about climate heating and the biosphere-killing effects of new insecticides and herbicides, but about more immediately human concerns such as vaccination and vote-counting – the know-nothing, hostile reactions to her revelations should not surprise us.

Silent Spring was Carson’s fourth book. The first, Under the Sea-Wind, was published in 1941 – not a propitious year for publishing anything that wasn’t about current politics, since the Second World War was under way and the United States was about to actively enter it. This first book – a lyrical and charming

If we make it to the 22nd century as a species, it will be in part due to her