I was on vacation walking down a wooded road in the Pocono Mountains in Pennsylvania on July 20, 2019, 50 years to the day after the first moon walk in 1969. I was remembering seeing Neil Armstrong on TV as he descended the ladder of the lunar landing module when I was 13 years old. It was an event that changed my perspective of the world and humanity.
My thoughts shifted when I picked up a small rock on the side of the road and found it held a fossil of a brachiopod seashell. I was standing approximately 1,700 feet above sea level, more than 100 miles away from the Atlantic Ocean. The fossil reminded me that most of North America was submerged under ocean water at various times in Earth’s history.
I had read this in a book I received for my birthday in 1969: The Sea Around Us, published in 1950 by Rachel Carson, a marine biologist. The book made me ponder not only the ocean, but our planet and life itself—much like the moon walk.
The Sea Around Us provides a geophysical history of the Earth and describes the development of life upon it. The book is rigorously researched and incorporates numerous studies and scientific sources. Carson was only a mid-level official of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service by profession. Yet, few scientists have matched her ability to synthesize so much diverse information in advancing a more comprehensive understanding of nature.
The Sea Around Us is landmark work that picks up where Darwin left off in linking life to its physical environment. It’s also enthralling and provocative literature, crafted with eloquent prose.
Millions of people have been moved by the picture taken by Michael Collins (who piloted the Apollo 11 command module while Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walked on the moon) of the “Earthrise” over the lunar horizon. Using data and analysis, Carson similarly viewed the Earth from her desk as a blue biosphere, the whole of which she determined was far greater than the sum of its parts. With no less wonderment than ancient peoples who created myths to explain weather phenomena, land forms and celestial bodies, Carson comprehended the pervasive interconnection of life with atmosphere, terrain, sea, and lunar and solar positioning.
Interestingly, few people I meet have ever heard of The Sea Around Us. Many, however, are aware of a later book Carson published in 1962: Silent Spring. It, too, was well researched and dealt with the connectedness of life and its physical surroundings.
Silent Spring exposed the danger of the unregulated use of the DDT (dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane) and other pesticides. Carson’s research showed how overuse of DDT hurt farming in the long run. Insects adapted to the chemical and became even more impervious pests. On the other hand, many animals were seriously harmed by DDT, including livestock, birds, and fish, while evidence was mounting on its toxicity for humans.
More alarming, DDT eventually worked its way into the broader environment. And it was just one of a growing number of synthetic chemicals contaminating the environment.
Not surprisingly, Silent Spring met with strong opposition. Carson faced an onslaught of negative propaganda and threats of lawsuits by the chemical industry, a powerful special interest group. Even Time magazine initially dismissed Carson’s findings, calling them overly emotional (an implied shot at her gender).
But Carson was resolute and unflappable, as she demonstrated in her testimony before a congressional committee. Her remarkable courage arose from her confidence in the truth and objective fact, unhampered by ideology or need for self-acclaim.
It was President John F. Kennedy who in 1961 challenged the American people in a speech before a joint session of Congress, with “landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the Earth” before the end of the decade. The following year, on Aug. 29, 1962, in a press conference President Kennedy brought Carson’s Silent Spring to the attention of the American people (jfklibrary.org).
Carson’s research and findings in Silent Spring were later validated by President Kennedy’s Science Advisory Committee report, titled “The Uses of Pesticides.” Silent Spring became a best seller and unleashed concern for the environment among the American populace.
President Kennedy was assassinated two years after his moon shot speech, and he never got to see his vision realized at the end of the decade. Similarly, Carson died two years after the publication of Silent Spring (from breast cancer), and never got to see the environmental movement she inspired come to fruition, including the establishment of the Environmental Protection Agency in 1970.
Carson updated The Sea Around Us several times. Her preface in her final (1961) edition placed the book in the context of the “Atomic Age” and commented on the consequences of dumping low-level nuclear waste materials into the ocean, which was the practice at the time:
“It is a curious situation that the sea, from which life first arose, should now be threatened by the activities of one form of that life. But the sea, though changed in a sinister way, will continue to exist; the threat is rather to life itself.”
Men looking back from the surface of the moon to their distant planet marked 1969 as one of the greatest years in human progress. But back at home, the year brought tragedy to the Central Coast of California that reasserted Carson’s warning to humanity.
In late January of 1969, oil gushed into the Pacific Ocean from a platform in the Santa Barbara Channel directly onto beaches stretching from Goleta to Ventura. The oil spill, the largest ever in U.S. waters at the time, eventually impacted life on shores from Pismo Beach to San Diego.
Carson’s prescription for environmental activism and stewardship for nature especially suit our contemporary society, which faces a looming deadline for slowing pollution-accelerated climate change. If there was ever a time when we needed a factually grounded, non-ideological, and prophetic response to our global existential challenges, it is now!
Scott Fina writes from Santa Maria. Send comments to the editor at clanham@santamariasun.com, or submit a letter for publication to letters@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in Sep 19-26, 2019.