Rachel Carson: The Sea Around Us

Many others have cheerfully gone to great trouble to help locate elusive documents, have sent me unpublished information and comments, and in many other ways have lightened my task. Among these are H. U. Sverdrup of the Norsk Polarinstitutt in Oslo; L. H. W. Cooper of the Laboratory at Plymouth; Thor Heyerdahl of Oslo; J. W. Christensen, Jens Eggvin, and Gunnar Rollefsen of the Fiskeridirektoratets Havforskingsinstitutt in Bergen; H. Blegvad, Secretary General of the International Council for the Exploration of the Sea; Hans Pettersson of the Oceanografiska Institutet in Göteborg; and, in the United States, John Putnam Marble of the National Research Council; Richard Fleming of the Hydrographic Office; Daniel Merriman of the Bingham Oceanographic Laboratory; Edward H. Smith of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution; W. N. Bradley and H. S. Ladd of the U.S. Geological Survey; Maurice Ewing of Columbia University; and F. R. Fosberg of George Washington University.

The front end paper is reproduced from a portion of the map, Il Mare di Amazones, by permission of the New York Public Library.

The library resources of many Government and private institutions have been placed freely at my disposal, and my special thanks are due Ida K. Johnson, Reference Librarian of the Interior Department Library, whose tireless researches and thorough knowledge of the available literature have been unfailingly helpful.

My absorption in the mystery and meaning of the sea have been stimulated and the writing of this book aided by the friendship and encouragement of William Beebe.

The leisure to write the book and the means of carrying on some of the studies that contributed to it were in large part made possible by the award of the Eugene F. Saxton Memorial Fellowship.

Rachel Carson (1907–1964) was one of the most influential American nature writers of the twentieth century. She wrote four critically acclaimed books, as well as articles and pamphlets on conservation and natural resources. Grounded in the scientific discoveries of the day, Carson’s works were notable for their intimate lyric prose that appealed to everyday Americans. She is considered one of the first environmentalists and popularized new ideas and words to describe man’s relationship to the earth, such as ecology , food chain , biosphere , and ecosystem.

Born in the rural town of Springdale, Pennsylvania, near the Allegheny River, Carson spent much of her childhood roaming her family’s sixty-five-acre farm and exploring the woods around her home. Her lifelong love of nature, encouraged by her mother, was coupled with a passion for writing, and her first published piece appeared in the popular children’s publication St. Nicholas when she was ten years old.

Carson pursued writing at the Pennsylvania College for Women (now called Chatham University) but switched her focus to biology before graduating in 1925. After studying at the esteemed Woods Hole Marine Biological Laboratory in Massachusetts and receiving a master’s degree in zoology from Johns Hopkins University in 1932, Carson joined the U.S. Bureau of Fish and Wildlife Service, where she worked for fifteen years as a scientist, editor, and editor-in-chief of the bureau’s publications. When she was named junior aquatic biologist in 1936, she was one of only two female professionals at the bureau.

Carson began writing natural history articles for the Baltimore Sun and other papers during the Depression and was encouraged to transform her scientific articles and pamphlets into general-interest pieces. In 1941 she published her first book, Under the Sea-Wind , which tells the story of the sea creatures and birds that dwell in and along North America’s eastern coast. In 1951 she published The Sea Around Us —about the ecosystems within and surrounding the world’s oceans—which captured the imaginations of readers around the world. The book became a cultural phenomenon and was named an outstanding book of the year by the New York Times , won a National Book Award and John Burroughs Award, and inspired an Academy Award–winning documentary of the same name. The book has sold more than one million copies and has been translated into twenty-eight languages. With this success, Carson left the Fish and Wildlife Service to become a fulltime writer, and in 1955 she published a follow-up to her bestseller, called The Edge of the Sea .

A year after publishing The Edge of the Sea , Carson adopted the orphaned son of one of her nieces. Stories of her outdoor adventures with Roger would become the touchstones of her essay in Woman’s Home Companion magazine, “Help Your Child to Wonder,” which was published posthumously as the illustrated The Sense of Wonder (1965).

But it was Carson’s fourth book, Silent Spring (1962), that would again catapult her into the limelight. In this book Carson challenged the widespread, conventional use of many chemical pesticides, including DDT, citing the long-term effects on marine and animal life. Silent Spring provoked an outcry of concern, as well as criticism from the chemical industry, government, and media. However, shortly after publication, her findings were accepted by the Science Advisory Committee under President John F. Kennedy. In 1970 President Nixon established the Environmental Protection Agency, and two years later the use of DDT was banned. The publication of Silent Spring has been credited with sparking the environmental movement in the United States and continues to inspire readers today.

Rachel Carson died in 1965 from breast cancer. She was fifty-seven years old. In 1969 the Fish and Wildlife Service named the Rachel Carson National Wildlife Refuge, near Carson’s home in Maine, in her honor.

Images courtesy of Rachel Carson Papers, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University