All scholars like to believe, or at least plausibly to imagine, that the course of professional life they have chosen is one of social utility and consequence. But in most instances this goal is supplementary to others more personal and more easily measurable. For it is obvious that to one so inclined a scholar’s life is replete with the delights of variety and uncommon satisfactions unknowable to so many of the world’s other toilers. The scholarly life offers unusual opportunities both for individual spiritual growth and for participation in a large social enterprise in which one is interacting with many remarkably intelligent, learned, and (if one is lucky) congenial colleagues.
But now and again one encounters among the learned some few whose love of learning inspires them, usually unintentionally, to what amounts to public heroism. And they, in their turn, inspire others. I have this week been reading, in a typically beautiful Library of America volume, some of the earlier writings on one of one of those I consider a true American culture hero, Rachel Carson (1907-1964). Rachel Carson, who looked pretty much like many middle-class midwestern American maiden ladies of the middle of the last century, was a marine biologist whose work inspired a deep sense of environmental responsibility that continues, against sometimes powerful commercial habit, to make our common lives as planetary dwellers just a bit more thoughtful and humane. She could neither have undertaken her project by intention nor stumbled into it by chance without a deep, precise, and ever expanding scientific scholarship. But even less could she have done so without the gift of her extraordinary powers as a writer. She has to be one of the greatest in the great tradition of American “nature writing,” a tradition that began earlier than Audibon or Thoreau. Her name deserves to be honored as among the few greatest in that category.
Rachel Carson came into something like public prominence in 1963 with the publication of Silent Spring. Lots of books make waves. This one made a tidal wave. It was the book version of a series of essays that had already appeared in the New Yorker magazine. People are still likely to characterize it as “the anti-DDT book”, but that is a near travesty of underestimation. It certainly true that it stimulated some powerful commercial forces to do all they could to discredit her. If your company’s motto is “Better things for better living through chemistry” you may be dismayed to have it pointed out that there might also be worse things for worse living through chemistry. It might have seemed a convenient fortuity to the Montsanto Corporation that Rachel Carson died the very next year. One of its better-selling products was a rather indiscriminate herbicide called “Round Up”. But like the spirit of old John Brown, Rachel Carson’s kept marching on, and marches yet. It continues to frustrate the ambitions of some would-be purveyors of convenient and highly profitable agricultural poisons. The “Environmental Movement” is among the most consequential, large, and continuing spiritual impulses of our own lifetimes. Like most “movements” it is of ambiguous potential. Perhaps the spotted owl has unreasonably harmed the economic health of rural Oregon. And certainly the “environmental review” might be the quarterly publication of a National Association of Nimbies. Very little good public policy is so good that it can overcome its distortion or manipulation by what are euphemistically called the “special interests.”
The works I have been reading ante-date the Silent Spring controversy—to the degree that we can actually submit to the word “controversy”. Any polemicism they exhibit is almost accidental. They mainly concern the biosphere of which we human being know the least, that of the vastness of the world’s waters, what the Bible calls sometimes simply “the deep”. Everything I have read in her is beautiful, and no small part of it needs a grander adjective, sublime perhaps. I certainly want to us that adjective of The Sea Around Us (1951), the book that perhaps first won for her popular fame. The preface to the revised edition begins with a sentence that perhaps states the premise her life’s scholarly work. The sea has always challenged the minds and imagination of men and even today it remains the last great frontier of Earth. For we (meaning the species of human beings, homo sapiens), we are seldom entirely absent from her arguments, and never from their implications. The sea—with its awesome powers, its unique beauties, its terrible dangers, its physical and imaginative majesty—is the background of the ancient imaginative epic. In our great literature the sea has been the province of adventure and the arena of for the exercise and testing of our physical powers and preposterous audacities. Several famous scholars have argued in varied and ingenious fashion of the importance of one little sea in particular, the Mediterranean, in the formation of “the West”. I refer to such much-discussed works as Fernand Braudel’s The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II (1972). Carson is a natural scientist, not an historical analyst, but she has a special interest in the ever-changing boundaries of the meeting points of terra firma and the Great Deep. For her the rapid increment in human understanding in the various fields of oceanography was one of the great enterprises of modern science, or from an alternative point of view one of the paradoxical upsides of human bestiality. “The awakening of active interest in the exploration of the sea came during the Second World War, when it became clear that our knowledge of the ocean was dangerously inadequate.”
