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

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Though not nearly as renowned as Carson’s classic Silent Spring (1962), Under the Sea Wind has in its quiet way stood the test of time. it has been reissued in several editions by various publishers since its debut. It was the first in what became known as Rachel Carson’s “Sea Trilogy.” 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. Under the Sea-Wind is structured in three parts, and in each part, we view the sea and sea life from the point of view of one of its inhabitants. 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. 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.

Rachel Louise Carson (May 27, 1907 – April 14, 1964) was an American marine biologist and conservationist whose book Silent Spring and other writings are credited with advancing the global environmental movement. Under the Sea-Wind was in the works since 1937 when Carson’s essay Undersea, published by Atlantic Monthly, caught the attention of Simon & Schuster who suggested she expand it into a book. Undersea is a narrative about the creatures on the ocean floor. It was originally material for the radio brochures of the U. S. Bureau of Fisheries based on her research on marine life at Chesapeake Bay. Though it is primarily a story, it is grounded in scientific detail of each creature’s appearance, diet and behavior. Quaratiello, Arlene. Rachel Carson: A Biography. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 2004, pp. 26–27. ISBN 0-313-32388-7.

More about Under the Sea Wind by Rachel Carson

Carson continues her marine expedition farther and deeper into the ocean, to return in the final paragraphs to this central interconnectedness of life — perhaps, she poetically suggests, our only real taste of immortality:

Late in the 1950s, Carson turned her attention to conservation, especially environmental problems that she believed were caused by synthetic pesticides. The result was Silent Spring (1962), which brought environmental concerns to an unprecedented share of the American people. Although Silent Spring was met with fierce opposition by chemical companies, it spurred a reversal in national pesticide policy, which led to a nationwide ban on DDT and other pesticides, and it inspired a grassroots environmental movement that led to the creation of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Carson was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom. In the nine years between the publication of The Edge of the Sea and her death from breast cancer, Carson’s reputation grew and changed drastically. The writer known during much of her life for her erudite portraits of nature achieved a level of celebrity and political influence that had seemed unimaginable. Yet it does not detract from the immense accomplishment of Silent Spring to know her also by the passions that defined her life, if not her legacy. Carson’s editor at Houghton Mifflin, Paul Brooks, told Sue Hubbell, who wrote the introduction to The Edge of the Sea’s second edition, that Carson had “talked for years about doing a book that was vast and unfocused, that was about Life Itself.” Brooks wasn’t in favor of the idea, but William Shawn, who brought Carson’s work to The New Yorker, wanted her to write next about the entire “universe.” 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 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.This Library of America series edition is printed on acid-free paper and features Smyth-sewn binding, a full cloth cover, and a ribbon marker. Recognized globally for her writing, Rachel Carson’s work has shaped environmental policy and imaginations worldwide. The book Silent Spring made Carson a household name, though it was not her first work. Published in 1962, Silent Spring was groundbreaking, detailing the negative impacts of synthetic pesticides, namely DDT, on the environment.

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 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. 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.” 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.

A 1942 review of Under the Sea Wind 

The story manages the most delicate of balances imaginable; it shows us the danger, savagery and fury of the natural Atlantic world, fish and birds die, hunting and predation are not sugar coated in any way, but the telling is so meticulous that reading the ways of the sea is at worst bitter sweet and it never becomes depressing. Another tactic of the author is to give us one or two 'characters' to follow through the story. This is masterly, because much as I love reading about marine life, following an individual lets one immerse in the story rather than feeling as though one is reading a textbook. Carson assigns names to the creatures. Often she uses the scientific names of species as character names. It is a great technique and coupled with her engaging writing you follow each one with rapt interest. I thought this would be childish but it wasn't. The vocabulary is too advanced and the scientific details too plentiful for the lines to feel childish. Everybody, even expert naturalists, will learn something new. Upon reading the book one has the feeling of being an invisible spectator of an eternal drama that began million of years ago and which promises to continue indefinitely, heedless of man and his exploitation of the continents. It is the same feeling one achieves when alone on a starry night he gazes upward into the immensity of space. Long before coming to the end of The Sea Trilogy, it becomes apparent that Carson has written something more than three individual books, each successful in its own way. They have a design and need to be seen as a sequence: a monumental centerpiece, The Sea Around Us—surely an epic in every sense of the term—flanked by a narrative of departure from the land and going undersea in Under the Sea-Wind, and by a return to the shore, less a narrative than a new personal vision in The Edge of the Sea. The first book begins with a dark coastal picture, all shadows and silvery reflections, and the last book ends with a dazzling array of tide pool pictures, each a microcosm of what surrounds us—distant mountains, the sky above, and water so pure it distills a radiant sunshine. The result is a whole of epic proportions, held together by leitmotifs and themes that steadily recur and echo one another—the bioluminescence of the sea at night, the intersections of death and re-birth, the processes of destruction and renewal, cosmic and geological as well as biological; the endless ambiguities and analogies between land and sea, or time and space, or permanence and change; the paradoxes of seeing and invisibility. Looked at this way, the trilogy has its own ecology, with each part intertwined with and enhanced by all the rest.