Touching the Oceans

Although Rachel Carson is most well known for Silent Spring (1962)—a book that would reveal the ill-effects of pesticide use for the environment—it is her trio of texts concerning the oceans which have always held my attention. I picked up a copy of The Sea Around Us (1951), the middle book of her oceanic trilogy, somewhat by accident, in a second-hand shop in a seaside town in Essex, one of the counties bordering London. It was the richly illustrated dustcover adorned with a sailship, octopus, fish, and seaweed that would capture my attention. Later, when I opened the book, it would be Carson's words. I was setting out on my own voyage, a doctoral degree that would send me out to sea. At the time, I was building an oceanic library, collecting books I thought looked interesting. I naively knew nothing of Carson, her background as a marine biologist or her reputation in environmental politics. I am glad I had that ignorance. I read the book at face value. I remember feeling I had leapt into the sea.

In The Sea Around Us, Carson traces the many and diverse ways we are connected to the seas: the linkages between what we take to be "land" and what we understand to be the "sea," the planetary and extraterrestrial forces that are intertwined with our oceans (the winds, the sun, and the moon), and the nonhuman life integral to oceans we have sought to know and understand. To convey such connections, Carson offers up to the reader a deep and detailed discussion of the geology and topography of the sea floor and the continual process of sediment snowfall on the bed of the ocean. She conveys an intricate discussion of biological life found in deep seas, cloaked by permanent darkness. Carson dispels any notion that the seas are monotonous surfaces, plains of undifferentiated blues, as often depicted on maps. She shows their color, their texture, their incessant movement, and their season changes. She relates attempts—from the distant past to what was then the present—of humans to measure, record, and make sense of these mobile liquid, three-dimensional spaces. In a book that takes us from the very earliest development of our seas, to her present day and "man's" relationships with the ocean, this book provided—and continues to provide—a comprehensive engagement with the most dominant physical feature of the Earth.

Yet Carson's book is so much more than a beautifully articulated foray into the relations associated with our oceans. Whilst on the one hand, a book about science and discovery, a text that tells us how other people have helped us know the seas around us, it is also a book where Carson's own voice emerges. In discussing the many connections and mergings that form our oceans—the seamless border between man and sea, sea and shore—it is not (for me at least) a purely scientific history and explanation that she constructs. Rather, Carson's account is an embodied one where it is her words that forge another connection—one between reader and writer. In the folds of the tides that Carson so elaborately explains, in the oceanic depths she describes, and in the lively depictions of sea life she conveys, Carson introduces us to, and then submerges us in the seas and oceans. She reminds us that those seas and oceans are there. She reminds us of their agency and power, their fragility, and their hidden wonders. Yet she not only reminds us but takes us there through language. The power of Carson's work is not so much in what she says, but how she says it. To read the text is to search and survey the ocean along with Carson. Her writing is so richly evocative that it is almost possible to see, hear, touch, and taste the oceans she describes. Carson's wonderment of the seas around her becomes our wonderment of the seas around us.

Such statements about the book might sound exaggerated. They are not. I first read Carson's text when I returned home...