The World of Waters: Rachel Carson’s Environmental Vision

It’s gotten very noticeable now. It’s become hard to find fish and things may get even harder. Before an hour’s catch would sustain you. Nowadays you fish from dawn to dusk and it’s still not enough.

When European boats fish here, nothing’s left for the small boats. Local fishermen take much less than the European boats.

In spite of our rather boastful talk about progress, and our pride in the gadgets of civilization, there is, I think, a growing suspicion—indeed, perhaps an uneasy certainty—that we have been sometimes a little too ingenuous for our own good. In spite of the truly marvellous inventiveness of the human brain, we are beginning to wonder whether our power to change the face of nature should not have been tempered with wisdom for our own good, and with a greater sense of responsibility for the welfare of generations to come.

In October of 1963, Rachel Carson presented the opening lecture to the Kaiser Foundation Hospitals and Permanent Medical Group in San Francisco. The lecture was entitled, “The Pollution of Our Environment” (Lear 1998: 227-45). It was the last speech she gave before she died, but also the first speech in which she identified herself as an ecologist. In the quote cited above, we can glimpse Carson’s passionate hope that human beings will discover the “wisdom for our own good” that will enable us to work together for a sustainable world (Lear 1998: 228). Today, Carson would be outraged with the plunder of marine life and habitat perpetrated to feed the unsustainable appetites of overdeveloped nations, as evidenced by the above testimonies (Cowan, 2003). Usually Carson’s fame is attributed to her 1962 book, Silent Spring, which challenged the widespread use of the pesticide DDT. But Carson’s vision was not confined to land-based environmental devastation; in fact, she had an oceanic vision. It is this larger horizon that I think is significant for ecotheology today, ecotheology in what Carson called a “world of waters” (Lear 1998: 4).

Carson’s work has already begun to be linked directly with ecotheology. For example Mary Heather MacKinnon and Moni McIntyre included the closing section from Silent Spring in their anthology, Readings in Ecology and Feminist Theology (1995: 19-24). In their collection, Carson was selected along with Valerie Saiving, Lynn White, Jr, Rosemary Radford Ruether, Carolyn Merchant and others, as “one of the most often cited authors who link the future of our planet to our perceptions of the human, the earth and the divine” (1995: x). Irene Diamond and Gloria Feman Orenstein dedicated their anthology, Reweaving the World, to Carson, citing Silent Spring as “pre-figuring the powerful environmental movement that culminated in the nationwide Earth Day of 1970” (1990: ix). They wrote, “Although Carson was not an avowed feminist many would argue that it was not coincidental that a woman was the first to respond both emotionally and scientifically to the wanton destruction of the natural world” (1990: ix). Catherine Keller’s work was also included in Diamond’s and Orenstein’s anthology, and her indebtedness to Carson can be seen in her new book, Face of the Deep, where she opens with a quote from Carson’s book, The Edge of the Sea, along with quotes from James Joyce, Helene Cixous and Charles Wesley. Not too bad company to keep!

Indebtedness is a fine tribute to a writer, but it is time for Carson’s work to be examined more closely for its oceanic vision in hopes that it will contribute to the flowing currents already in Christian theology towards sustainable wisdom. This paper offers an initial attempt to explore Carson’s work in this direction.^ⁱ As Elaine Wainwright has identified the hope of our Women Scholars of Religion and Theology (WSRT) network as the “transformation of religious traditions and social consciousness,” I suggest that Carson’s deep connection of environmental love and knowledge can aid us in this transformative task (2002: 76).

In 1999, Time magazine chose Rachel Carson as one of the 100 most influential people of the 20^th century (30). The list presents her name under the category of “Scientists and Thinkers” as an “environmentalist”. But years before environmental activism became the social, political, economic and spiritual movement it is today, Rachel Carson was brought before the U.S. Senate inquiry into pesticide use. As recounted by Calvin DeWitt, U.S. Senator Abraham Ribicoff looked at her and declared, “Miss Carson, you are the lady who started all this” (1995: 1116). Ribicoff was right. Rachel Carson, known to many as marine scientist, author, activist, educator, devoted friend and family caregiver, was one person who changed the way many of us understand, value and care for our world and each other.

In 2002, we marked forty years since the publication of Carson’s book Silent Spring (1962). Michael Zimmerman claims that Carson’s research for the book was the catalyst for the contemporary environmental movement. He explains:

Carson urged her fellow citizens to examine critically their taken-for-granted attitudes toward living nature. Her cautionary tale not only demonstrated that birds were dying from misguided human practices but also implied that people might be next (1998: 2).

Silent Spring was prophetic, challenging and controversial, while establishing Carson in the forefront of environmental politics. The book’s precautionary warning continues to inspire the hopes and fears of many different people around our world, all concerned with conservation and sustainability.

Carson earned a M.A. in Zoology at John Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland in 1932. She was the second female professional hired by the former U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. During her 15-year federal career there (1937-1952), she rose from aquatic biologist to editor-in-chief of all Service publications. After 1952, she devoted herself to writing full-time and caring for her family. Tragically, Rachel Carson died of cancer and heart disease on April 14, 1964, at the age of 56 (Lear 1998: 1).

Carson has been described as a quiet, soft-spoken and conventional woman. So we need to ask, what enabled Carson to “confront the American scientific and business establishments and tell the world that we were destroying the planet we shared with other species?” (McKay 1993: 1). I think that through her deep emotional connection to nature along with her careful observation and research, Rachel Carson gained a compassionate, spiritual wisdom about our human situation. She embodied what Sallie McFague has described as “the loving eye”, where we know our world through being “in touch with others” (1997: 95, 111). From the opening quote, we can hear that Carson did not think negatively about human beings and their power for creativity, invention, and culture. But we also hear that Carson believed that human beings did not yet display the collective wisdom necessary to sustain ourselves. We need wisdom for our own good and a sense of responsibility for future generations.

But this wisdom was not only concerned with human beings. Carson believed passionately that our good was intimately connected to the good of the planet, all living beings and habitats. As Paul Brooks concludes about Rachel Carson, “Few of us have dwelt with such awareness and understanding in the house of life” (1973: xi). Brooks’ use of the word ‘house’ is vital for theology today. The stem ‘eco’ in the word ‘ecology’ draws on the Greek term oikos, meaning ‘house’ or ‘habitation’. Even though the field of ecology was only beginning to be understood, Carson understood it only too well—the earth is our home and we share it with many others. The problem is, we are living in our home rather thoughtlessly and recklessly, endangering the habitats of other creatures. As she explained in her 1938 article “Fight for Wildlife Pushed Ahead”:

The inescapable fact that the decline of wildlife is linked with human destinies is being driven home by conservation the nation over. Wildlife, it is pointed out, is dwindling because its home is being destroyed. But the home of wildlife is also our home (Lear 1998: 15).

Rachel Carson understood the rich interrelatedness of beings in the whole household of life. We remain indebted to Silent Spring for its clear wake-up call for environmental wisdom. Carson showed that because the environment was a complex, holistic system, chemicals used intentionally in one part of the household for one particular purpose were entering the food chain and ending up in other parts of the household with devastating consequences that were unintended. While the details of scientific knowledge continue to change due to ongoing research and exploration, the values of her wisdom continue to speak to us today. We can continue to learn from her household wisdom.

But before the publication of Silent Spring, Carson wrote three books on the ocean and each one serves as an important piece to her environmental wisdom. As Mary McCay explains:

Silent Spring was not just a single act of courage; however, it was the natural outcome of all the work Carson had done both as a scientist and as a writer. Her ecological stand in her last book is the natural outcome of Carson’s earliest wish to teach people about the sea so they would respect its creatures and would understand that the oceans could not be exploited endlessly without terrible cost (1993: ix).

Thus Carson’s environmental wisdom was anchored in her deep love for the ocean. Her first book was entitled Under the Sea-Wind, published in 1941. Here, Carson invited the general public into the daily lives of three groups of travellers—sea birds, mackerels and eels. She took readers into the travellers’ dwelling places in order to learn about the different habitats and to empathise with their struggles and delights. Unfortunately, because of the war, Under the Sea-Wind was barely noticed.

But in 1951, Carson’s second book, The Sea Around Us, offered the public a “monumental synthesis of the science of oceanography” and catapulted her to international fame (Lear 1998: 51). One year later, Under the Sea-Wind was re-published with Oxford University Press, and it became a bestseller on the N.Y. Times list along with The Sea Around Us. The financial success of the two books enabled Carson to leave government employment and devote herself to writing, the care of her family and her emerging political activism. Since she was no longer encumbered by government restrictions, she began to express more freely her views on the politics of wilderness conservation.

In 1955, Carson’s third book was published, entitled The Edge of the Sea. This book focused on the ocean’s coastal habitats, looking closely at the different patterns and rhythms of shore life from rocky coastlines to sandy shores and coral reefs. Carson remained fascinated at the many species that could live in this marginal world of elements--water, air, light and land.

In all three books, we sense Carson’s appreciation for the vast ages of geological time and the on-going forces of change and creativity through the earth’s dynamic processes. Carson had a way of inviting people into the very lives of sea-creatures so that people could understand the intricate systems of currents, waves, weather, birth and death. She conveyed her own awe and wonder at the mystery of life, yet not in such a way that readers became overwhelmed by its vastness. In her wisdom, Carson held together a focus on the small, individual and particular with the great, collective and universal. As she wrote in the conclusion to The Edge of the Sea:

What is the meaning of so tiny a being as the transparent wisp of protoplasm that is a sea lace, existing for some reason inscrutable to us—a reason that demands its presence by the trillion amid the rocks and weeds of the shore? The meaning haunts and ever eludes us, and in its very pursuit we approach the ultimate mystery of Life itself (1998[1955]: 250).

In each book, we hear her growing awareness and concern about humans poisoning the environment or destroying the world through nuclear weapons. In fact in The Edge of the Sea, Carson was already concerned about the warming of the ocean and its negative effect on marine life (1998[1955]: 23-4). Through her writing, Carson stressed the theme of human arrogance at not knowing what we do; yet she never wrote from mockery, only with great and deep compassion.

But Carson’s ecological wisdom can actually be traced back further than these three books. In 1935, Carson wrote an introduction to a brochure for the U.S. Bureau of Fisheries, her first post. The piece was about the ocean and she entitled it, “The World of Waters” (Lear 1998: 3). But her supervisor thought that her writing style was too lyrical for a government report. He suggested that she send it to a magazine instead. She did, and in 1937, the Atlantic Monthly published her piece re-entitled as “Undersea” (Lear 1998: 3-11). Later she confessed that from these earliest pages, “everything else followed” (Lear 1998: 150).

In “Undersea”, Carson took readers “beyond the limits of their landlocked experience” into a place “that will utterly change their perspective on their world” (McKay 1993: 23). This is exactly what Carson sought to do—change people’s perspectives on the world. She realised that many human beings privilege the land by thinking that their own dwelling places are the norm, without having a sense of the larger habitat-horizon. We are geo-centric beings in our perspective! In contrast, Carson desired to take readers into another environment, one that was actually intimately linked with their own land-based habitats. So, Carson guided readers on a journey that dove beneath the waves. She wrote these words about her purpose:

To sense this world of waters known to the creatures of the sea we must shed our human perceptions of length and breadth and time and place, and enter vicariously into a universe of all-pervading water. For to the sea’s children nothing is so important as the fluidity of their world (Lear 1998: 4).

In this short piece, Carson travelled from the coastal shallows through the layers of feeding fish all the way down to the muddy, abysmal floor. On the way, readers were introduced to unfamiliar creatures, while they experienced vicariously the changes in light, colour, temperature and density. Readers entered fluidic space and learned that the ocean is not a silent and empty void, chaotic and evil, but teeming with life, sounds, currents and communication.

“Undersea” provided the basis for Carson’s first book, Under the Sea Wind (1991[1941]), in which she continued her perspective that “the central character” was the ocean itself (Lear 1998: 55-6). Thus, through her writing, Carson invited readers to experience an identification with something so vast and beyond human limits—the ocean, covering over 70% of the world’s surface. We glimpse Carson’s “environmental ontology,” where all beings of the ocean live interdependently as part of a vast, flowing whole (Lear 1998: xiii). We participate in elemental energies larger than any single process and join the community of these beings within their—now our—world of waters. By identifying imaginatively with other beings, Carson sought to shift our sense of community from a shallow anthropocentric perspective to a deeper, “biocratic” one in which we share public space with other beings who also need recognition and consideration (McFague 1993: 109).

From her earliest writing flows Carson’s wisdom of the goodness of creation, the value and dignity of life, and the ultimate mystery and expanse of life. As McCay suggests, “Undersea” is like a shell in which we hear the sound of the sea--“small, perfect and hinting at a larger world” (1993: 23). The essay takes readers on a journey that requires imaginative intuition, yet offers the scientific knowledge of its time. According to Carson’s wisdom, science and feeling or love need not be antagonists. Like philosopher Martha Nussbaum making her case over five decades later (1990), Carson trusted that love also offers knowledge of reality and serves as a basis for ethical decision-making. According to Carson, science and love together provide the deepest sense of knowing. Carson’s passion for the sea and the creatures of the sea, can be understood in a similar way to how Barbara McClintock, the Nobel prize winning botanist, understood her research with corn, as based on “a feeling for the organism” (Keller 1983). Carson’s oceanic vision suggests that only in empathising with other living beings and habitats can we begin to understand others and ourselves in the house of life. Then we can begin to care with wisdom.

We have seen that Rachel Carson’s environmental wisdom was anchored in the connection between her scientific and empathetic knowledge of the ocean. Carson saw the ocean for the first time in the summer of 1929, while studying at the Marine Biological Laboratory at Woods Hole, Massachusetts. Here she became interested in American and European eels and their trans-Atlantic life cycles. Back at John Hopkins University, she studied the effect that changes in the salinity of seawater had on eels (1991[1941]: 209-72).

Linda Lear writes that one of the most meaningful encounters with the ocean for Carson occurred on her first visit to the U.S. Fisheries Station in Beaufort, North Carolina in July of 1938 (Lear 1997: 94). Carson had gone there for a ten-day vacation—it was the largest fisheries research facility on the east coast of the U.S. next to the one at Woods Hole. She brought along her mother Maria Carson, and her sisters, Virginia and Marjorie. Together they rented a cottage on one of the outer banks. This particular stretch of beach would later figure as the setting for the chapters on shorebirds in Under the Sea-Wind.

Evidently, Carson walked the beach at all hours, especially at night, when she watched, observed and collected material. She lay on the dunes with her arms under her head, flat on her back, watching and listening to the birds as they circled and dove overhead. Lear shares the story:

(Rachel) discovered the marsh pools and ponds in the flat sands where the dunes of the barrier island fell away to the ocean. There she would sit for hours, totally enraptured, watching wave after wave pour through the slough into the ponds where the high water released thousands of small fish that had been captive there perhaps since the last spring tide. Their race down the slough to the ocean moved her profoundly. Sometimes as she watched their leaping struggle, the tears streamed down her cheeks, tears produced by the awe she felt at the mystery of life…

Flashlight in hand, she watched the shore’s nocturnal creatures come out of hidden homes, unseen to even the most careful observers during the daytime. Jotting down notes about the distinctive atmosphere of the shore at night when the smell and sound of the surf, the stillness of the ponds, the occasional call of a bird, and the scent of the pines behind her on the higher ground replace the visual description of daylight, she gathered the images that would give her writing some of its most distinctive motifs.

Rachel fell in love with the barren dunes of the outer banks that summer and with the mysterious relationship between shore and sea. Although she returned to the Carolina banks spring and fall many times later, the wonder of that place, as she first knew it in 1938 remained vividly in her memory (Lear 1997: 94).

In this narrative, we can envision Rachel Carson as a woman thoroughly committed to understanding her ‘object’ of scientific study. But Carson did not do this as an uninvolved, distant observer. She loved the sea and lived with the sea close-up—in-touch, as McFague would say—with all its amazing and diverse communities of life. What Rachel Carson learned about environmental wisdom, she learned first through her relation with the sea. Thus, as McCay claims, “The ocean became the medium through which Carson spoke to the world” (1993: ix).

We can celebrate today that Rachel Carson sought to share her love of the ocean and its many beings through her writings. But Carson believed that something more was needed. While it is vital to pass on a healthy, sustainable environment to future generations, Carson believed that we have to pass on our love of nature as well. Carson was concerned with how we teach environmental values to our children. Thus, how do we pass on to children what we have come to love and care for? This was not an abstract question for Carson, because besides the sea, one of her other passionate joys in life was raising her young grandnephew, Roger Christie.

In an article “Help Your Child to Wonder,” first published in July, 1956 in the magazine Woman’s Home Companion, Carson told a story about sharing her “sea love” with Roger when he was only 3 years old:

One stormy autumn night when my nephew Roger was about 20 months old I wrapped him in a blanket and carried him down to the beach in the rainy darkness. Out there, just at the edge of where-we-couldn’t-see, big waves were thundering in, dimly seen white shapes that boomed and shouted and threw great handfuls of froth at us. Together we laughed for pure joy—he a baby meeting for the first time the wild tumult of Oceanus, I with the salt of half a lifetime of sea love in me. But I think we felt the same spine-tingling response to the vast roaring ocean and the wild night around us (1998[1965]: 15).

Carson’s appreciation of wonder led her to believe that adults and children become receptive to what is around them when they learn through their senses. For her, knowledge must be based not only on facts, but also on experiences of beauty, excitement, admiration and love. Thus a child needs to have at least one adult willing to share her or his own sense of wonder with the child. If adults and children had these experiences, then there would be fewer chances—she believed—of destroying nature and more possibilities of spiritual renewal. As Carson explained, “Those who contemplate the beauty of the earth find reserves of strength that will endure as long as life lasts” (1998[1965]: 100).

Through passing on her sea-love to her family, friends and readers, Rachel Carson conveyed her deep faith in life with its own integrity, intrinsic value and meaningfulness. She believed that life for each one of us is a gift, yet as human beings we must understand ourselves within the whole household of life. Thus, just as other creatures are part of the evolutionary, ecological cycles of life and death, dependence and sustenance, decay and birth, humans can embrace their mortality as part of life’s “material immortality”, as Carson mentioned in the close of her first article, “Undersea” (Lear 1998: 11). Rather than hear these words with our typical sense of diminished significance or morbidity, we can hear Carson calling us to situate our lives within the oikos, to love life even through our deaths. Rather than withhold our bodies and the meaning of our lives in death for an otherworldly economy of salvation, Carson’s vision exemplifies what Roslyn Diprose names “corporeal generosity” (2002: 14), in which we gift ourselves to others without obligation and recognition. In Carson’s wisdom, human generosity extends to the environment through our participation in the earth’s cycles of nourishment, sustenance and the replenishment of life. Through her careful attentiveness to the sea, Carson celebrated how our lives circulate with other beings and contribute to future generations. As Carson observed years ago, “For it is now clear that in the sea nothing lives to itself” (1998[1955]: 37). Can we honour such an ecological vision of generosity in our lives today, even in our deaths?

For ecotheology, Carson’s sea-love offers a radical challenge to bring theology down to earth, or perhaps in light of Carson’s oceanic vision, we should say down to the sea, and reclaim once again that earthy and watery story from Genesis 1: 1-2 of our humble origins. “In the beginning when God created the sky and the land, the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep…” ”Habel 2002: 43). We are earth creatures with salt water still flowing within us, making up 70% of our bodies. Perhaps we cannot embrace the full joy of “abundant life” (John 10:10), until we can know ourselves as embraced by the love of God in and through the embrace of earth. Thus, we can entrust our lives to the mystery of creation, since as Anne Elvey suggests, the earth “stores up” our lives in death (2002: 97). Ecotheology invites us to return the embrace by thinking, feeling and practicing anew our models of God and God’s relation to the earth. Thus, as a resource for ecotheology, Carson’s oceanic wisdom challenges theologies of “hyperseparation” (Plumwood 1997[1993]: 49) between humankind, otherkind, God and the earth. Enlivened by Carson’s loving eyes, ecotheology can continue its hope of “earth healing” (Edwards 2001) by understanding the wonder-full communion of God with the great diversity of life in creation, including life in the dark and dense “recesses of the deep” (Job 38:16).

For Rachel Carson, what began as small, humble drops of deep feeling and commitment eventually became a large sea-swell of global awareness and social change. We can remember and honour Rachel Carson as one of the foremothers of the contemporary environmental movement. She has inspired the work of ecophilosophers, ecofeminists, environmental scientists, poets and green politicians, amongst many others. Hopefully in time, she will also be recognized by ecotheologians for her oceanic imagination and passion for life in its full Mystery.

If she were alive today, Carson would be amazed at the new knowledge we have about our blue-green oikos. She would wonder anew at the hot water vents on the bottom of the sea and the colonies of crabs, tubeworms and other newly discovered species existing in this sulphur-based environment (Van Dover 1996). She would cry out with distress at the melting glaciers, rising sea levels and endangered coastal communities due to global warming (Soares 1998). She would grieve for the dying coral reefs, the plundering of marine life, and the dead zones full of waste and pollution (Marx 1999). Certainly she warned us years ago, and her wise words concerning our common vulnerability with the ocean and its life are as important today as ever before.

Some people argue that for the future, we need a strong dose of “eco-realism” to ground our efforts toward sustainability (DeWitt 1995: 1116 ). Eco-realism is an ethical orientation that assumes that science alone can be trusted for objective and true knowledge concerning the environment. But Carson’s life and work shows us that scientific knowledge and the knowledge of love can work together as wisdom for our own good. Sustainability can be nurtured by our empathetic identification with other living beings and their habitats. As Rachel Carson embodied in her own practice, love for others leads to listening, attentiveness, protection and justice, and vice versa. Through identification, we learn more and more about the complex, interdependence of creatures, thus greater becomes our shared sense of compassion and accountability. For ecotheology, this attentiveness to life in its watery depths need not be understood as over against a Christian love of God. By taking us undersea, Carson connected our diverse human habitats with the diverse habitats of many communities sharing together in the whole household of life. Hopefully, this is a love we can share with our children and many generations after. Carson’s oceanic vision invites us and ecotheology to fathom the depths of divine and creaturely generosity toward an oikoumene of sustenance for the full flourishing of life.

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