The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
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exercise in the type of animal-centred nature writing pioneered by Ernest Thompson Seton in Wild Animals I Have Known and Henry Williamson in Tarka the Otter and Salar the Salmon – would probably today be marketed as Young Adult or children’s literature, though Carson’s intended audience was broader. She aimed to raise awareness about the interconnectedness of life through following the stories of three organisms: a sanderling, a mackerel and an eel.
Stories people tell about other life forms or objects are inevitably anthropomorphic – even “The Life of a Pencil” and Hans Christian Andersen’s tale about a Christmas tree are like that – so it’s no use dissing Carson in that respect. Once you embark on plots concerning individuals with points of view, humanising them will be the result, whether you dress your animal characters up in frocks and sailor hats, like Beatrix Potter, or let them swim naked, like Carson’s eel. On the plus side, this technique helps readers empathise with other life forms. On the minus side, eels don’t really have human names, nor do otters or wolves, so some Easter Bunnying is inevitably going on.
But the delight in the sea’s many mysteries and gifts are well worth the read, though such a story written today would have to include the many man-made perils the organisms would now face: habitat destruction, pollution, the threat of extinction. Anguilla the eel would doubtless have to struggle with a plastic bag, and Silverbar the sanderling’s migration would be more like that of the last of the curlews, in Fred Bodsworth’s tragic novel of that name.
Carson’s next book, The Sea Around Us, was published in 1951 – the year after postwar austerity seemed finally over – and was a huge success. It’s not a fictionalised account, but a factual one, combining history and prehistory and geology and biology in a secular and celebratory hymn to the ocean. Many were eager to follow its author beneath the waves, into the ultramarine depths.
Remember Captain Nemo, of Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea? Maybe you don’t, but in 1951, many readers did. Under the sea was a realm of adventure and wonder, and how thrilling it was to be taken on a tour by such a well-informed and enthusiastic guide! No mermaids, but on the other hand, marvels even greater. It was this book that put Rachel Carson on the national and international map.
The Edge of the Sea, the third in Carson’s sea trilogy, came in 1955. This is the book with which I identified most closely then, when I was 15. It’s about beachcombing, something I myself had done a lot of along the coast of the Bay of Fundy during visits to my Nova Scotian relatives in the postwar summers of the late 1940s and early 1950s. The tide pools and caves and flora and starfish and gastropods of that shore were the same as those across the bay in Maine, so the first third of The Edge of the Sea – which is about New England, before Carson progresses down the Atlantic seaboard – was speaking about creatures I had seen myself. I still can’t pass a rock pool at low tide without looking to see what might possibly be in there.
In all three of these books there is one underlying refrain: Look. See. Observe. Learn. Wonder. Question. Conclude. Rachel Carson taught people to look at the sea, and to think about the sea, in fresh ways. She brought the same habits of mind to the observations of bird life – to the dwindling bird life she was noticing – that led to Silent Spring. Without her work on the oceans, she would not have developed the tools that enabled her investigation on the effects of pesticides. And without the fame and the platform that her sea trilogy had brought her, no one would have listened to her alarming message, once she had delivered it. And if no one had listened to it, there would no longer be any eagles, or peregrines, or – eventually – woodland warblers.
Rachel Carson is one of the grandparents of the environmental movement; as such, I made her a Saint of the God’s Gardeners in my novel The Year of the Flood. We human beings owe her a vast debt, and if we make it to the 22nd century as a species it will be in part due to her. Thank you, Saint Rachel, wherever you may be.
Under the Sea-Wind, The Sea Around Us and The Edge of the Sea by Rachel Carson (Canongate, £9.99) are out on Thurs