Rachel Carson Has Known the Ocean

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In the spring of 1936, Rachel Carson was working part-time at the United States Bureau of Fisheries in Baltimore. Her job mostly involved communications—producing radio scripts, reports, and brochures, the latter of which would change the course of her life. Asked to write an introduction for a brochure on fish, she delivered something that was lyrical, lively, and, according to her manager, entirely too good to be a government brochure. “I don’t think it will do,” Carson’s boss is said to have remarked. “Better try again. But send this one to The Atlantic.”

She eventually did, and in the summer of 1937, she got a response. “We have every one of us been impressed by your uncommonly eloquent little essay,” Edward Weeks, an Atlantic editor, wrote from Boston. “The findings of science you have illuminated in such a way as to fire the imagination of the layman.” The magazine ran Carson’s essay with the title “Undersea” in the September 1937 issue. Weeks had identified what many of Carson’s readers would come to understand: She didn’t merely present facts and information, but invited readers to join her in a way of seeing beyond the limits of our own perceptions. The wonder animating her writing and the beauty of her prose is what made it so effective—and what subjected her to intense criticism as a woman writing about science.

A meticulous editor of her own work, Carson scrapped an elaborate opening to “Undersea” in favor of a simple one: “Who has known the ocean?” The answer—that “neither you nor I, with our earthbound senses” can possibly experience that alien medium—becomes a summons “to sense this world of waters known to the creatures of the sea.” Carson advises readers to “shed our human perceptions of length and breadth and time and place, and enter vicariously into a universe of all-pervading water.”

The essay that follows is an exercise in doing just that. Carson’s writing moves like a musical composition, carrying the reader through different realms of sea life—the tide pool, the middle depths of the ocean, the ungraspable reaches of its floor. In her telling, each element taken together makes for a grand cosmic symphony. “Every living thing of the ocean, plant and animal alike, returns to the water at the end of its own life span the materials that had been temporarily assembled to form its body,” she explains. “Individual elements are lost to view, only to reappear again and again in different incarnations in a kind of material immortality” that lives in everything: the tiniest plankton, the yellow-crowned purple sea slug, the great bulk of the blue whale.

The sensibilities that Carson embodied—an engagement with the natural world rooted in both wonder and scientific rigor—continued a tradition of women naturalists extending back to the 19th century. On her family’s farm outside of Pittsburgh, Carson’s mother, Maria, encouraged her to explore and study on her own. Maria, and Carson herself, were shaped by writers such as Olive Thorne Miller and Anna Botsford Comstock, who brought to life birds, insects, plants, and forests. The influence on Carson was profound. By age 8, she was already writing a book about birds for her father; at 11, she published her first of four articles in the national children’s magazine St. Nicholas. By 25, she had a master’s degree in zoology and a bachelor’s degree in biology.

Carson’s credentials—and her remarkable powers of expression—soon found themselves in tension with assumptions about her gender. Between the time she wrote her first “Undersea” draft and its publication, she was hired full-time as a junior aquatic biologist, making her one of two women at the Bureau of Fisheries in a nonclerical role. As she prepared the manuscript, she was sensitive to questions about her authority. Writing to Weeks about her preference for publishing under the name “R. L. Carson,” she explained that she had often used that byline in the past because she and her Bureau colleagues believed her work would be “more effective” if it was “presumably written by a man.”

She did eventually allow The Atlantic to use her full name in the contributor’s column (but not on the article itself). As she later reflected, “Everything else followed” from “Undersea.” The essay garnered the attention of an editor at Simon & Schuster, and became the basis for the first of her three books about the sea published from 1941 to 1955. Those works cemented her reputation long before Silent Spring, her crowning achievement, laid bare the deadly effects of pesticides in 1962.

With Silent Spring, the blend of curiosity and scientific rigor that made “Undersea” so compelling evoked something more than wonder; it became a call to environmental action. Carson challenged powerful chemical companies over the effects of their products on wildlife and people. The reaction to the book also reinforced the concerns Carson had voiced about her byline in The Atlantic. As Silent Spring’s influence grew, she became subject to intense backlash, much of which questioned her credibility as a woman writing about science outside of academia. For critics, the lyrical quality of Carson’s writing was grounds for suspicion rather than praise. “Many scientists sympathize with Miss Carson’s love of wildlife, and even with her mystical attachment to the balance of nature,” one wrote in Time. “But they fear that her emotional and inaccurate outburst in Silent Spring may do harm by alarming the non-technical public.”

The trouble for Carson’s critics was that even if her attachments to nature seemed a little mystical, her conclusions were correct. What they decried as a flight of fancy or emotion was instead a serious proposition. Using the findings of science to awaken people’s imaginations wasn’t a problem; it was the point. As Carson told a group of women journalists in 1954, “The more clearly we can focus our attention on the wonders and realities of the universe about us, the less taste we shall have for destruction.”