I am a hurried reader, of necessity. This book should have been enjoyed on a beach somewhere, with that same ocean breeze in my face and the calls of those seabirds in my ears – not in sips at stoplights, gulps on my lunch break and while fighting to stay awake late in the evening after work. But life is what it is. 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.”

And the eels lay offshore in the March sea, waiting for the time when they should enter the waters of the land, the sea, too, lay restless, awaiting the time when once more it should encroach upon the coastal plain, and creep up the sides of the foothills, and lap at the bases of the mountain ranges. According to environmental engineer and Carson scholar H. Patricia Hynes, "Silent Spring altered the balance of power in the world. No one since would be able to sell pollution as the necessary underside of progress so easily or uncritically." Some would linger in the river estuaries . . . But the females would press on, swimming up against the currents of the rivers. They would move swiftly and by night as their mothers had come down the rivers. Their columns, miles in length, would wind up along the shallows. . . . No hardship and no obstacle would deter them. They would be preyed upon . . .They would swarm . . . they would squirm. . . . Some would go on for hundreds of miles . . .

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According to Brooks, Carson requested that a piece of her writing about the sea be read at the funeral. The selection—which ultimately wasn’t read, though it’s not clear why—came from a coda to The Edge of the Sea that’s pure poetic flourish reminiscent of a sermon, which speaks of distant coasts “made one by the unifying touch of the sea” and “the stream of life, flowing as inexorably as any ocean current, from past to unknown future.” I f Carson’s sea books can serve a “utilitarian” purpose today, guesses Sandra Steingraber, an environmental activist and the editor of the new Sea Trilogy edition, they mark a “disappearing natural baseline” that describes “how the all-creating ocean functioned, how its creatures lived and interacted.” As I read, I noted, sadly, all the past-tense verbs in that sentence. Is it already too late to know the sea as Carson once did? In her introduction, Steingraber goes on to list the currently unfolding catastrophes that Carson never lived to see: “industrial overfishing, or news of the potential collapse of the Gulf Stream, or massive floating garbage patches, or icebergs the size of states breaking off Antarctica, or micro-plastics replacing plankton in the water column, or plans for deep-sea mining.” To that list one might add ocean acidification, hypoxic dead zones, sonar testing, and coral die-off. Steingraber strains for some silver lining: “But her words fortify us for battles” and—she sums things up waveringly—“inspire curiosity and care about what we are in the process of losing.” It is always the unseen that most deeply stirs our imagination, and so it is with waves. The largest and most awe-inspiring waves of the ocean are invisible; they move on their mysterious courses far down in the hidden depths of the sea, rolling ponderously and unceasingly.

Wheeler, J. C. (2013). Rachel Carson: Extraordinary Environmentalist. Minneapolis, Minn: Abdo Publishing. 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 h Stewart, Frank. A Natural History of Nature Writing. Island Press, 1995, p. 170. ISBN 1-55963-279-8. Annie Chester is a writer and co-founder of expatalachians. She writes about the environment and culture in Appalachia and abroad. She is currently a postgraduate student at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland.Is wonder still possible, given our climate crisis? Wonder implies some degree of leisure and time; it requires slow, sustained, and contemplative attention—a luxury that, perhaps, we can no longer afford. Even Carson, when she wrote the new preface for the revised 1961 edition of The Sea Around Us, couldn’t help but inject an urgent warning about the practice of dumping nuclear waste into the ocean. She called the previous assurance that the sea was so large as to be inviolate a “naive” belief. Today, as dire emergencies unfold, rationalizing time spent merely appreciating the natural world seems even more difficult. During the COP26 climate conference, protesters held up signs spelling doom and chanted: “If not now, when? When?” Greta Thunberg summarily declared the conference a failure, dismissing it as a meaningless PR event for “beautiful speeches.” Rachel Carson writes about the sea, the sand, the birds, fish and the smallest of creatures and organisms in a way that makes us realise how little we observe of what is occurring around us, though we may stand, swim, float or fish in the midst of it. For the sea, its shore and the air above thrum like a thriving city of predator and prey of all sizes and character, constantly fluctuating, its citizens ever alert to when it is prudent to move and when it is necessary to be still. In each example all the details—colors, light, impressions, images, even metaphors—come from the creatures who are there watching, not from the author directly. We are asked to imagine what they see. The next chapter presents an extended scene observed by gulls whose “eyes missed nothing”: 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.

Shoals of young herring . . . with bodies flashing bronze and silver in the sun, appeared to the watching sea birds like dark clouds ruffling to a deep blue the smooth sheet of the sea.The ocean is a place of paradoxes. It is the home of the great white shark, two thousand pound killer of the seas. And of the hundred foot blue whale, the largest animal that ever lived. It is also the home of living things so small that your two hands may scoop up as many of them as there are stars in the Milky Way. And it is becoming of the flowering of astronomical numbers of these diminutive plants known as diatoms, that the surface waters of the ocean are in reality boundless pastures. Her style is as readable as that in any animal story, but without most of the anthropomorphism of which so many writers are guilty. She has tried to present the activities of typical oceanic animals from what may be imagined to be their point of view. Celebrating the mystery and beauty of birds and sea creatures in their natural habitat, Under the Sea-Wind—Rachel Carson’s first book and her personal favorite—is the early masterwork of one of America’s greatest nature writers. Rachel Carson--pioneering environmentalist and author of Silent Spring--opens our eyes to the wonders of the natural world in her groundbreaking paean to the sea. I was stunned, for example, by her account of how the molten earth’s atmosphere cooled and produced centuries of rain (“The Gray Beginnings”), by her bleak visions of the ocean’s deepest abysses, drained of all color and utterly hostile to life (“The Sunless Sea” and “The Long Snowfall”), by her many chapters of marine history—oceanic navigation since the Phoenicians—as well as by her sense of undersea topography as a mirror of what we see and measure above sea level, except that its “mountains” and “valleys” are much taller, deeper, and more mysterious (“Hidden Lands”). Again and again, it’s Carson’s language that makes these visionary landscapes unforgettable. Then too she increases her credibility with frequent admissions of fallibility: