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What is there not to love about Rachel Carson? Her amazing story is a beacon and a touchstone for us all. She embodies the engaged, committed teacher who is intimately familiar with her subject matter and loves and respects her students and readers. Having developed an early love of the natural world growing up in the river town of Springdale Pennsylvania and exploring the forests and fields of her family farm, she went to college at the Pennsylvania College for Women where she started by studying English and ended up studying Biology. She received her MA in in Zoology from Johns Hopkins but she couldn’t  afford to pursue her PhD so she wound up with a part time job with the US Bureau of Fisheries.

There she wrote seven minute radio programs called “Romance Under the Waters” ostensibly to popularize aquatic life and extend the general public’s understanding of different animals interdependence with its organic and inorganic environment. She also wrote articles for the Baltimore Sun where she argued that we should consider the well being of the “fish as well as the fisherman.” In 1936 she was appointed junior aquatic biologist for the the US Bureau of Fisheries, being only one of two women to work there. This is a woman that is not going to take no for an answer from the fathers or big brothers of patriarchy or get tripped up by the catch 22’s of capitalism. Ultimately she will take on big business, the federal government and engrained cultural mindsets of privilege, greed and abundance from the position of an upper level government bureaucrat and an independent thinker, writer and scientist.

In the meantime she continued to write in a way that was poetic, scientific and accessible to laypeople. “Rereading her natural histories, what stands out is how beautiful the writing is. Carson combined a scientist’s ability to see with a novelist’s ability to imagine. She excelled at describing the very large and the very small; she found ways to reveal the drama inherent in nature, while at the same time allowing the natural world to retain its fundamental strangeness.”

Her first book, Under the Sea-Wind, introduced various species of animal as characters in her typical prose-poem-novelistic style. She shares her intimate knowledge of the natural world  in ways lay people and young readers can understand. She writes “Under the Sea-Wind was written to make  the sea  and its life  as vivid a reality  for those who read the book as it has become for me during the past decade.” Carson immediately addresses the problem of coming up with a central character for her story, since no one animal lives and moves in all the parts of the sea that she is attempting to describe. But the answer lies in her question. The central character is the sea itself and thus she effortlessly shifts into an ecological approach to understanding biological phenomena and species behavior.

Similarly she splits the difference between an anthropomorphism that  would eviscerate the animal’s difference, and a behavioral positivism that puts the animal’s consciousness outside the ken of human understanding. She refuses to stay within the rigid categories of dogmatic thinking and instead attends closely to the clearings and continuities of experience. “To get the feeling of what it is like to to be a creature of the sea  requires the active exercise of the imagination and the temporary abandonment of many human concepts  and human yardsticks…..We cannot get the full flavor of marine life —cannot project ourselves vicariously into it— unless we make these adjustments in our thinking…..On the other hand, we must not depart too far from analogy with human conduct if a fish, shrimp, comb jelly, or bird is to seem real to us —-as real as a living creature as he actually is.” So we have to put aside familiar concepts and yardsticks and adjust our thinking to experience the real difference between ourselves and another animal, and at the same time acknowledge a hermeneutic circle of “sentience” and connection that would allow for cross species understanding. 

Carson is the ideal teacher because she is the ideal learner: open to the natural world she is curious about, responsible to the natural world she loves. She seeks to understand, care for and elaborate, rather than to control, dominate and master. She is a passionate teacher, able to distill her learning, knowledge and appreciation of the natural world and communicate it in a way that does not in anyway diminish the complexity and depth of her subject or her reader. 

In one of my favorite of her natural histories, “The Edge of the Sea,” Rachel Carson shares some of her hard won knowledge with the rest of us, who are not the most observant passer-byers.  “Some of the most beautiful pools of the shore are not exposed to the casual passerby. They must be searched for—perhaps in low-lying basins hidden by great rocks that seemed to be heaped up in disorder and confusion, perhaps in darkened recesses under a projecting ledge, perhaps under a thick curtain of concealing weeds. I know such a hidden pool.” The rest of us might totally miss the place where all the action is, might walk right by it without giving it a second thought, but not Rachel Carson. Within this confusion and disorder, in the midst of dark recesses and wild projections, and a thick curtain of concealment, lies the seeds of clarity and order, insight and openness, the unconcealment and consanguinity of the living creature as it actually is: if approached properly. 

“[The hidden pool} lies in a sea cave, at low tide filling  perhaps the lower third of its chamber. As the flooding tide returns the pool grows, swelling in volume until all the cave is water filled and the cave and the rocks that form and contain it, are drowned beneath the fullness of the tide.When the tide is low, however, it can be approached from landward side.” Only at certain times, when the tide is low can this specific theater of ocean life be perceived. “Massive rocks form its floor its walls and roof. They are penetrated by only a few openings—two near the floor on the sea side and one high on the landward wall. Here one may lie on the rocky threshold and peer threw the low entrance into the cave and down into the pool.” To gain access one must make adjustments in one’s typical ways of thinking, be in a timely fashion, and properly align one’s eye with what one is looking at in order to perceive this especial play.

“The cave is not really dark; indeed on a bright day it glows with a cool green light. The source of this soft radiance is the sunlight that enters through the openings  low on the floor of the pool, but only after its entrance into the pool does the light itself become transformed, invested with a living color of purest, palest green that is borrowed from the covering of sponge on the floor of the cave.” Light, color, darkness, perception and understanding are all interconnected, all part of one whole. With this empirically precise prose Carson is deconstructing Plato’s allegory of the cave (and the history of western philosophy in general) where the darkness, confusions and projections of the cave  are illuminated by its inevitable supplement, the idealized reason of the philosopher sun king. The goal of “field research” is not to objectively stand outside what one is observing or to lose oneself in it, but to muddle through, staying in contact and connection with what one would understand.

“Through the same openings that admit the light, fish come in from the sea, explore the green hall, and depart again into the vaster waters beyond. Through those low portals the tides ebb and flow.” The same openings that allow the light that allows for perception also allow the real passage of creatures into the cave and then out into the “vaster waters beyond.”  “Invisibly they [the tides] bring in minerals—the raw materials for the living chemistry of the plants and animals of the cave. They bring, invisibly again, the larvae of many sea creatures—drifting, drifting in their search for a resting place.” Again it is actual, real openings that allow for the stuff upon which the intellectual edifices of biochemistry and molecular biology can be built. “Some will remain and settle here; others will go out on the next tide.” “Home” and “species are relative concepts based on an animal’s movements and natural history in relation with other animals, plants and and the organic and inorganic environment. Home itself is a system of elaborate exchanges and interconnections.

“Looking down into the small world confined within the walls of the cave, one feels the rhythms of the  greater sea world beyond. The waters of the pool are never still. Their level changes not only gradually with the rise and fall of the tide, but also abruptly with the pulse of the surf. As the backwash of a wave draws its seaward, the water falls away rapidly; then with a sudden reversal the inrushing water foams and surges upward almost to one’s face.” Microcosm and macrocosm are not symbols of one another but navigable, heterogeneous space(s). Questions of scale, being and becoming, dependence and autonomy, self and context are never resolved once and for all, but rather take the form of interdependent, syncopated rhythms that surge and recede, sometimes in the form of a distant murmur, sometimes as cold, salty water in the face. Knowledge is not mastery over nature, or even certain clear and distinct ideas about the world, but an exploration of, and a becoming familiar with, where one lives and finding one’s place in this world.

In the centerpiece of her trilogy on the sea, Carson reaches epic heights and depths of elaboration and sweep, encompassing the rise and fall of life itself in the context of the sea.“For the sea lies all about us. The commerce of all lands must cross it. The very winds that move over the lands have been cradled on its broad expanse and seek ever to return to it. The continents themselves dissolve and pass into the sea, in grain after grain of eroded land. So the rains that rose from it return again in rivers. In its mysterious past it encompasses all the dim origins of life and receives in the end, after, it may be, many transmutations, the dead husks of that same life. For all at last return to the sea—to Oceanus, the ocean river, like the ever-flowing stream of time, the beginning and the end.”

The ocean is the ultimate context of life and death on earth but it is not definitive in the sense of a teleology or a final destination, because it is in the commerce of all lands crossing this encircling sea that the natural history of the individual and the group is made and unmade in the “ever-flowing stream of time.” I can’t emphasize this enough. The defining gesture of Rachel Carson’s thought is an openness to experience that goes beyond idealism and realism, and only resolves itself in an ongoing engagement with the world in its being and becoming. In her “biography of the ocean” Carson reveals her unflagging love of the world in her tenacious curiosity about how life grows, develops, adapts and changes, “as real as it actually is,” and in her fierce protectiveness of the interconnectedness and interdependence of all forms of life.

But we still have not  reached the point in Rachel Carson’s story where she becomes famous as one of the central figures and leaders in the modern environmental movement. Alarmed by the pernicious effects of DDT and other so called “pesticides” she has witnessed in her own field studies and has heard about from other researchers, she begins to hope that someone will take up the task of documenting and communicating the dangerous fall out of poisonous chemicals in the environment. Thankfully for us, she realizes that sense of inner responsibility that comes to all of us who would search our souls and ask, if not me, who, if not now, when? Armed with extensive documentation and no personal axe to grind, she gets to the heart of the problem. “Insecticides,” developed and marketed as the domestic version of the atomic bomb, are in fact “biocides,” and are destroying the whole fabric of life, and in process sickening and killing people.

“These sprays, dusts, and aerosols are now applied almost universally to farms, gardens, forests, and homes—nonselective chemicals that have the power to kill every insect, the ‘good’ and the ‘bad,’ to still the song of birds and the leaping of fish in the streams, to coat the leaves with a deadly film, and to linger on in soil-all this though the intended target may be only a few weeds or insects. Can anyone believe it is possible to lay down such a barrage of poisons on the surface of the earth without making it unfit for all life? They should not be called ‘insecticides,’ but ‘biocides.’”

She contests the rhetoric of big agro-business and the chemical companies  and takes her argument directly to the people.

“We urgently need an end to these false assurances, to the sugar coating of unpalatable facts. It is the public that is being asked to assume the risks that the insect controllers calculate. The public must decide whether it wishes to continue on the present road, and it can do so only when in full possession of the facts.”

So the facts happen to be that in the name of progress, science and the pursuit of happiness we are assaulting our homes, we are poisoning our planet, we are killing ourselves.

“The most alarming of all man’s assaults upon the environment is the contamination of air, earth, rivers, and sea with dangerous and even lethal materials. This pollution is for the most part irrecoverable; the chain of evil it initiates not only in the world that must support life but in living tissues is for the most part irreversible. In this now universal contamination of the environment, chemicals are the sinister and little-recognized partners of radiation in changing the very nature of the world-the very nature of its life.”

The chemical companies, their lackeys in government and other hangers on to the military-industrial-entertainment complex immediately attacked her with ad hominem arguments and sexist tirades saying she was a probably a communist or at the very least an organic food faddist, and that wasn’t it just like a woman to be concerned about a few little bugs. Her lack, at the time, of an institutional position left her open to the charge that she was an amateur, out of her league, and that she was some sort of pantheistic, nature loving, sentimentalist. But her decisive testimony to the United States Congress in 1963 led to the banning of DDT. And while we are still in the midst of terrible challenges to the integrity and viability of biodiversity, sustainable  forms of human consumption, and healthy forms of planetary coexistence, I and the people of New England have been privileged to see among many other positive signs of life, the reestablishment of healthy populations of Osprey because DDT was banned. Most significantly there is a robust environmental activist community that has taken the mantel laid down by Rachel Carson on her death in 1964 from breast cancer.

Carson writes in Silent Spring  “[t]hose who contemplate the beauty of the earth find reserves of strength that will endure as long as life lasts. There is something infinitely healing in the repeated refrains of nature — the assurance that dawn comes after night, and spring after winter.” The ultimate moral/educational theme of her work is the central role of wonder, curiosity and the celebration of the natural world in the pursuit of knowledge and the care of each other and the earth. I discuss her last book, The Sense of Wonder: A Celebration of Nature for Parents and Children, in the section of this blog entitled Wonderful Ideas. Let us all kneel down at the hem of Carson’s trousers and dig a little deeper into the sources of our own sense of wonder. We owe that to her legacy.

http://www.rachelcarson.org/

https://www.fws.gov/refuge/Rachel_Carson/about/rachelcarson.html

https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/rachel-carsons-natural-histories

http://www.lindalear.com/rachel_carson__witness_for_nature__27233.htm

http://www.environmentandsociety.org/exhibitions/silent-spring/personal-attacks-rachel-carson

http://www.environmentandsociety.org/

http://www.tidalzone.org/tidepool.html