276°
Posted 20 hours ago

Under the Sea-wind: A Naturalist's Picture of Ocean Life

£9.9£99Clearance
ZTS2023's avatar
Shared by
ZTS2023
Joined in 2023
82
63

About this deal

A variety of groups ranging from government institutions to environmental and conservation organizations to scholarly societies have celebrated Carson's life and work since her death. Perhaps most significantly, on June 9, 1980, Carson was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian honor in the United States. A 17¢ Great Americans series postage stamp was issued in h The book started out as an assignment she completed in 1936, when she was an unemployed zoologist and freelance writer for the U.S. Bureau of Fisheries. Asked to write an introduction to a brochure on marine life, she submitted an essay entitled “The World of Waters” neatly typed by her mother, as all her manuscripts would be.

a b c Sullivan, Marnie (2012). Vakoc, Douglas (ed.). Revealing the Radical in Rachel Carson's Three Sea Books. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. pp.75–88. After 10 years of uneventful river habitation, the eels are drawn by instinct downriver returning to their place of birth, a deep abyss near the Sargasso Sea where they will spawn and die. It is the most remarkable journey, as is that of the newborn spawn originating from two continents, who float side by side and drift towards those same coastal rivers their parents swam from, a voyage of years and over time the two species will separate and veer towards their continent, the US or Europe. Note how the grandeur increases as the sentence gathers rolling force and weight, climaxed by its two four-syllable adverbs. The chapter’s final paragraph ends with another poetic summation—impossible not to quote!—of how much remains unknown about the great ocean around us:

Carson’s examples—virtually a gazetteer of American beach sand— range from the narrowly local to the far distant; not many science writers would attempt it. But what is most remarkable is that she breathes life into it. In accepting her National Book Award in 1952, alongside Marianne Moore (a richly-suggestive coincidence), she said: “There is no such thing as a separate literature of science, since the aim of science is to discover and illuminate the truth, which is also the aim of all true literature.”

Some would linger in the river estuaries . . . But the females would press on, swimming up against the currents of the rivers. They would move swiftly and by night as their mothers had come down the rivers. Their columns, miles in length, would wind up along the shallows. . . . No hardship and no obstacle would deter them. They would be preyed upon . . .They would swarm . . . they would squirm. . . . Some would go on for hundreds of miles . . .

Become a Member

Lear, Linda. Under the Sea-Wind. RachelCarson.org. http://www.rachelcarson.org/UnderTheSeaWind.aspx

Rachel Carson: The Sea Trilogy is kept in print by a gift to the Guardians of American Letters Fund from The Gould Family Foundation, which also provided project support for the volume. After a tour of some of the ocean’s most unusual and dazzling creatures, Carson considers the glorious and inevitable interconnectedness of the natural world, no different from the “inescapable network of mutuality” which Martin Luther King so passionately championed in the human world. She writes: The appeal of The Sea Around Us, written more than seventy years ago, remains strong today, partly because so much of what it describes has changed little—to our eyes, at least—and sometimes not at all. The weeds that grow today in the Sargasso Sea, Carson tells us, are exactly the same plants Columbus saw when he sailed by in 1492. (Interesting, no?) But the book’s critical virtue is not really in its vast subject—how the earth’s ocean was formed, how it generated life as we know it, how its tides and currents and waves determine what grows and evolves, shaping and re-shaping the land it surrounds—but in how Carson writes about it. It doesn’t matter if recent marine science says she got some things “wrong.” Her only obligation, to paraphrase what Henry James once said about the novel, is the obligation to be interesting. [3] She does that unfailingly, I think, nearly all of the time. As a youngster, Carson wanted to be a writer, a poet even. University and a job with the United States Fish and Wildlife Service turned her into a marine biologist with a passion for the sea and an urge to share it. In The Sea Around Us she marries her early ambition with her skills as a researcher and synthesiser. She ranges over the fields of geology, palaeontology, biology and human history, combining the scientist's eye for detail with the poet's feeling for rhythm and clarity of expression. The book's commercial success enabled Carson to leave her job and dedicate her life to independent research and writing. One result of this independence was The Edge of the Sea, the book that completed the Sea trilogy and which moves the beach walker's gaze from the sea before them to the sand and stones beneath their feet. The second outcome was the writing of Silent Spring, Carson's most famous book and one which was instrumental in both the banning of DDT and the crystallisation of 1960s environmentalism. Without The Sea Around Us, Silent Spring might never have been written.

Popular

In Part One, Edge of the Sea, written for the life of the shore, and inspired by a stretch of North Carolina sea-coast, we meet a female sanderling she names Silverbar, it is Spring and the great Spring migration of shore birds is at its height and concludes with the end of summer where the movements of birds, fish, shrimp and other water creatures heralds the changing of the seasons. In detailing a tern’s relationship to the sea (a type of seabird), Carson indirectly and perfectly characterizes the human-sea relationship:

Long before scientists like pioneering oceanographer Sylvia “Her Deepness” Earle plunged into the depths of the ocean, Carson shepherds the human imagination to the mysterious wonderland thriving below the surface of the seas that envelop Earth:Rachel Carson’s a seminal figure in eco literature, especially for her book Silent Spring. Before being known as a writer, she was a marine biologist with the U.S. Bureau of Fisheries, and she analyzed and reported on fish populations and wrote brochures for the public. In July 1937, the Atlantic Monthly accepted and published an essay titled “Undersea” which her supervisor had turned down for a bureau brochure (it was too good for the purpose). She was then approached by Simon and Schuster to expand and write a full book, and her first book, Under the Sea Wind, published in 1941. In 1935, she secured a job at the U.S. Bureau of Fisheries. In her part-time position, Carson created radio program scripts about marine life and wrote brochures for the department. When she submitted a brochure about marine life to the bureau chief, he rejected it, urging her instead to submit it to The Atlantic Monthly. It was the early draft of Undersea, which The Atlantic published and later became Under the Sea-Wind. By 1937, Carson had a full-time position as a biologist at the Bureau of Fisheries. Rachel Carson, 1944. Via Wikimedia. I imagine Rachel somewhere along the Atlantic coast, sometime in the late 1930s, the ocean breeze tussling her hair, salt spray in her face, learning firsthand what a trawl and a gill net are, and all the other terminology of the fishermen; learning the names of the seabirds that dived and soared around her – sanderlings, skuas, jaegers; and of course, learning all the mysterious creatures that live in the waters below. They leave in their wake a cloud of transparent spheres of infinitesimal size, a vast, sprawling river of life, the sea’s counterpart of the river of stars that flows through the sky as the Milky Way. There are known to be hundreds of millions of eggs to the square mile, billions in an area a fishing vessel could cruise over in an hour, hundreds of trillions in the whole spawning area. In beautiful lyrical prose, Rachel L. Carson in Under the Sea Wind stirs the imagination with her portrayal of the endlessness of life and death in the sea. For the sea was the cradle of all life, and still is a shelter for an endless array of living forms in the most eternal cycle of life that is to be found on earth.

Asda Great Deal

Free UK shipping. 15 day free returns.
Community Updates
*So you can easily identify outgoing links on our site, we've marked them with an "*" symbol. Links on our site are monetised, but this never affects which deals get posted. Find more info in our FAQs and About Us page.
New Comment