The Sea Around Us

July 18, 2024
Tara C. Trapani
 

“To stand at the edge of the sea, to sense the ebb and flow of the tides, to feel the breath of a mist, is to have knowledge of things that are as nearly eternal as any earthly life can be.”
—Rachel Carson

Recently, I was reminded of Rachel Carson's gorgeous, sweeping Sea Trilogy. I'll be spending a few days with the ocean soon, and as I ran my fingers along the books on my shelf to find the right companion to accompany me, I landed on the Oxford edition of The Sea Around Us. 

A marine biologist by trade, before the landmark Silent Spring was ever written, she penned three volumes on the beloved ocean: Under the Sea Wind; The Sea Around Us (National Book Award Winner); and The Edge of the Sea. They are both science and poetry, teaching tools and love letters to the vast and mysterious ocean. 

There have been some lovely recent reflections on these timeless volumes. In 2022, The Nation published “The Many Moods: Rachel Carson's Sea” and The Atlantic reflected on Rachel Carson and the sea in “What it Would Take to See the World Completely Differently” (preview here, full text only availble to subscribers, unfortunately). And reviews of the new 2021 Library of America edition (like this one in Scientific American), serve to keep these valuable titles in the public consciousness. 

In 1953 The Sea Around Us was made into a full-length documentary by film and television producer, Irwin Allen, and won the Oscar for Best Documentary Feature. See the full film below. Poignantly and presciently, the film ends with an early warning about climate change:

There is a theory so startling and so scientifically documented that all the world might well take notice. The theory is that here in the Arctic waste, buried beneath a billion tons of frozen sea, hides an astonishing secret. If all the ice in all the world continues to melt, the levels of all the seas will rise 100 feet or more and the great coastal cities of all the world might well be drowned. It has been established beyond all reasonable doubt that the great Arctic change of climates started somewhere about 1900 and has spread so rapidly that small glaciers have already disappeared, and the big ones are melting at a startling rate. Man, with all the science of the past at his command, now knows the melting of all these glaciers, coupled with the drastic upheaval of the land masses of the globe, might one day drown more than half the Earth. What is the fate of the world? Is this the end?

 

In 2021, Library of America released a new edition of the Sea Trilogy in one volume. The editor of this edition was writer and biologist Sandra Steingraber, author of Living Downstream: An Ecologist’s Personal Investigation of Cancer and the Environment; Having Faith: An Ecologist’s Journey to Motherhood; and Raising Elijah: Protecting Our Children in an Age of Environmental Crisis. Here she gives an online talk and Q&A about these “lyrical and deeply personal classics of American science and nature writing.”
 

The time I've spent with these volumes of hers will forever affect my relationship with the ocean, as both far vaster and more complex and more intimate and personal, than I could have ever conceived on my own, without her lyrical wisdom.  So, as you play on the sand this summer and splash about in the waves, stop for a moment, take a breath, and realize that “to stand at the edge of the sea, to sense the ebb and flow of the tides, to feel the breath of a mist, is to have knowledge of things that are as nearly eternal as any earthly life can be.”