Under the Sea Wind by Rachel Carson

Now the hours of darkness were as many as the hours of daylight; the sun passed through the constellation of the scales; and September's moon waned to a thin ghost of itself. And as the tides poured through the inlet race into the harbor, creaming with white ripplings over the rocks, and lapsed again to the sea from which they  came, they carried away day after day more of the small fish of the harbor. So there came a night when the flood tide stirred in the young mackerel Scomber a strange uneasiness, and on that night the ebb tide, running to the sea, drew him with it. With him went many of the young mackerel who had spent the late summer in the harbor, a school of several hundred cleanly molded young fish each longer than a man's hand. Now they had left behind the pleasant life of the harbor; until death should claim them their world would be open sea.

The ocean can be unsettling to human beings: an unindividuated sheet of water, rolling over the entire world. Yet the featureless surface of the ocean belies an entire world, with regions, ecosystems, communities, conflicts. Rachel Carson, perhaps best known today as the woman who successfully led the effort to ban DDT, was a great advocate for the natural world, and Under the Sea Wind shows why: not only did she have a compendious knowledge of the sea, its forests and creatures, but the skill of language that brings such a place alive to us, who find it otherwise strange and difficult to imagine. Under the Sea Wind tracks the life of the oceans between Cape Cod and the Virginia capes over the course of a single year, following the fish, birds, jellyfish, whales, and plankton that live and die there.

There are a couple things I found really impressive about Under the Sea Wind. First is Carson's skill in keeping the "story," such as it is, going, without it feeling tedious or repetitive. Though the book reveals how diverse the sea really is, let's be honest, there's only so many ways you can write that animal A tried to eat animal B but then ended up being eaten by animal C. But Carson's language keeps the cyclical processes of ocean life seeming fresh and new, turning them into the stuff that literature is made of: ambition, conflict, wandering.

The second thing is the tightrope of anthropomorphism that Carson walks throughout the book. There are humans in her picture of sea life--to ignore them would be dishonest, given the impact of the fishing industry, for example, on the enormous schools of mackerel that move off the capes--but they are just one species in a whole panorama. A bolder choice is the way she gives individual animals names--often taken from their Latinate genus or species name--to turn them into a kind of character, elevating them above the others of their species. Each section has a protagonist of sorts: Rhynchops, the black skimmer, Scomber, the plucky young mackerel trying to make his way in a dangerous world, Anguilla, the eel who begins to feel a mysterious pull to return from North America's rivers to the depths of the sea from which she has long been absent, there to breed and die. (I especially appreciated how this section complements Patrik Svensson's Book of Eels, which explores the persistent and still unsolved mystery of how eels reproduce.) Carson avoids making these animals too human; they never become "Under the Sea" style cartoons. But she does manage to bring their emotions up to a recognizably human level, and find a parallel between the kind of fear, wonder, or desire a fish might feel with that of a human being.