by Rachel Carson
This is one of the nature books recommended for Level 5 Year 1 (ninth grade) by the beta Mater Amabilis™ plans (available in the high school facebook group). If you have read books from Mater Amabilis™ through elementary or middle school, you will encounter passages recalling A Book of Discovery and A Doorway of Amethyst, among others. These are fresh in my mind as First Daughter enters Level 3 this year (sixth grade) and it's lovely to consider how these connections will grow and develop over the years, creating a rich background for any future studies.
I have the Special Edition linked above with a beautiful forward by Ann Zwinger and a chapter added at the end by Jeffrey Levinton with updated scientific information (as of 1989).
Though originally published in 1950 and revised in 1961, the scientific information in the book is not generally outdated. Often, Carson described observations rather than formulating theories. When she does talk about theories, there are often competing ones described and an admission that they just didn't know the answers yet. Levinton's chapter at the end provided some scientific updates but I don't remember anything striking me there as out-dated either. His writing is not nearly as lovely as that of Carson.
Carson begins before there was even an ocean, exploring how the earth formed and eventually water precipitated out and rained down. She explores in thought and word the ocean's surface, it's hidden depths, islands erupting, tides, and climate.
[Islands] are ephemeral, created today, destroyed tomorrow. With few exceptions, they are the results of the violent, explosive, earth-shaking eruptions of submarine volcanoes, working perhaps for millions of years to achieve their end. It is one of the paradoxes in the ways of earth and sea that a process seemingly so destructive, so catastrophic in nature, can result in an act of creation.She easily brings the ancient life (and death) of the ocean creatures to a modern life, encouraging by her words excursions to seas long expired as well as the current sea-shore.
You do not have to travel to find the sea, for the traces of its ancient stands are everywhere about. Though you may be a thousand miles inland, you can easily find reminders that will reconstruct for the eye and ear of the mind the processions of its ghostly waves and the roar of its surf, far back in time. So, on a mountain top in Pennsylvania, I have sat on rocks of whitened limestone, fashioned of the shells of billions upon billions of minute sea creatures.In the last paragraph of the book, she writes:
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 to 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.My father was a bit unnerved that I chose a book by Carson for First Son to read. He believes her Silent Spring was the beginning of policies that have endangered millions of people who now die of malaria. First of all, there's very little of environmental hyperbole in The Sea Around Us. (Frankly, there's more of that in Levinton's chapter than the whole rest of the book combined.)
Secondly, Carson never advocated eliminating pest control entirely, though I'm sure some of her acolytes did. I researched a little about the use of DDT today and learned that some countries are indeed using it because other measures were not as successful at curbing mosquito populations and malarial infections. It seems like most medical communities, however, are concerned about its effects not just on the environment or birds but on the health of people themselves. (Some countries spray it only inside houses, on all the walls.) It seems likely that DDT in these cases prevents deaths from malaria but may be causing other health problems, so it seems prudent to continue to seek for other methods of addressing malaria.
All that to say, this is a book you can read even if you think Carson was completely wrong about DDT, but my own opinion is that DDT is detrimental and we should be continually seeking out other methods of controlling mosquitos and the spread of malaria.
In the Introduction, Ann Zwinger quoted Rachel Carson's speech after accepting the National Book Award:
"The winds, the sea, and the moving tides are what they are," she said. "If there is wonder and beautify and majesty in them, science will discover these qualities. If they are not there, science cannot create them. If there is poetry in my book about the sea, it is not because I deliberately put it there but because no one could write truthfully about the sea and leave out the poetry."I think it's likely there are lots of academic publications about the sea or the tides that lack poetry, but this book certainly does not. It's absolutely delightful.
I purchased this book used. I received nothing for this review. The links above are affiliate links to Amazon.
