Content area
Full Text
Rachel Carson: The Sea Trilogy Sandra Steingraber, ed. The Library of America, 2021
Rachel Carson set the bar for how we think about nature. Through a career of prose, she helped launched the modern environmental movement. That career began in earnest with the publication of an article entitled "Undersea," which ran in The Atlantic in 1937. It began with a simple question: "Who has known the ocean?" She began to answer it with these lyrical words:
Neither you nor I, with our earth-bound senses, know the foam and surge of the tide that beats over the crab hiding under the seaweed of his tide-pool home; or the lilt of the long, slow swells of mid-ocean, where shoals of wandering fish prey and are preyed upon, and the dolphin breaks the waves to breathe the upper atmosphere. Nor can we know the vicissitudes of the ocean floor. . . .
Carson went on to describe a journey from the seashore to the deep ocean that included "crepuscular shadows" and "abyssal creatures."
"Undersea" is a good place to begin this enriching Library of America collection of Carson's writing on the sea. The article, as well as two other documents, an explanatory note, and a chronology of Carson's life appear at the back of the book, but they tee up the collection's three primary texts-Under the Sea-Wind (1941), The Sea Around...