Book Readings: Week 1

For my Marine Resources class (GEOG 646) at SF State this semester I am reading The Sea Around Us, by Rachel Carson (1951), and The Tide: The Science and Stories Behind the Greatest Force on Earth, by Hugh Aldersey-Williams (2016). Please check out my first Book Reading blog post to read about why I chose these two books and why I chose to blog about them concurrently.

I'm about forty pages into The Sea Around Us and have been loving every word of it so far. Everyone I know who has read Carson's work praises her prose style, and it's with good reason: Even though the tone of her writing can come off very businesslike and almost methodical, Carson's love of the ocean shines through in the vivid, sensory details she uses to describe the seas as well as the staggering variety of organisms and natural phenomena that exist within them. Reading her words made me feel like I was reading the script of a fantastic science documentary series, like Carl Sagan's Cosmos or the BBC's The Blue Planet. As a side note, I am wondering now how much Sagan, of whom I am a big fan, might have been influenced by Carson. In the definitive biography Carl Sagan: A Life, Keay Davidson argues that Sagan anticipated the modern environmental movement in his published writings several year's before Carson's landmark book, Silent Spring (p. 93). However, such writings would still have come well after the first publication of The Sea Around Us.

I like that Carson starts her book quite literally from the beginning, teaching her readers about the very formation of the earth and of the oceans themselves before going into any further detail. She then goes through geologic time, discussing the changes the Earth goes through and how those changes shaped our oceans. After "setting the stage" for her readers in this way, she then begins to discuss the current ocean. She starts by talking about the patterns and activities within the ocean's surface, and then discusses how the ocean changes seasonally. It's after this point where I stopped reading to begin blogging.

It was fun to read Carson's descriptions of various forms of life, from microscopic diatoms all the way up to large creatures like giant squids and cetaceans. Her writing style feels both timeless and of its time: the latter when she mentions species whose names have since changed, and the former when she glides from one part of the globe to the next describing various ocean processes that have been occurring since the oceans first came into being. (Even though I did stop and go to Wikipedia to look up a few names Carson drops into the narrative, such as Phaeocystis and Meganyctiphanes, I didn’t think it was necessary to do so to understand her writing.)

When Carson published her book in 1951, most people thought of the oceans as a vast, hardly changing place, except for at the coastal margins and the surface ocean. Both the coastal margins and the surface were known to be a place of abundant life and constant change, probably because these two portions of the oceans were (and are still) the easiest for humans to observe directly.

However, people's understanding of the oceans shifted quite significantly just a few years later. My copy of Carson‘s book includes a preface she wrote ten years after the original publication of The Sea Around Us, and she explicitly mentions in this preface that a new way of thinking about the ocean has emerged: Instead of viewing the oceans as a vast, mostly unchanging mass of water, people have begun to realize that humans can and are changing the oceans, usually for the worse. Carson in particular is concerned about the dumping of radioactive materials (the waste product of nuclear testing) into the sea. She quite rightly points out that these radioactive materials will linger in the ocean for decades to come, and that instead of being confined to a single area of the globe, they will eventually be circulated throughout the entire world over the course of the ocean's mixing time. Of additional note is the fact that this preface was written just a year before Silent Spring was published, so we know the negative impacts of human activity were on Carson's mind at the time.

I have not read as far into The Tides as I have with Carson's book, but I am enjoying what I've seen so far. In particular, I really appreciate Aldersey-Williams' manifesto of sorts in his introduction: He really wants his readers to get a real, intimate understanding of tides, one that is different from a symbolic, abstract understanding of tides that is based solely on equations or conceptual thought. By providing the history and folklore surrounding tides and by describing tides and tidal phenomena around the world in very physical, sensory terms, Aldersey-Williams endeavors to show us and describe to us the tides as a tangible, visceral experience.

I appreciate this statement of intent from the author because it is exactly why I wanted to read a book about tides in the first place: I feel that I understand the basics of how tides work on an abstract level, but I don't feel that I have the sort of instinctual, innate sense of the tides that comes with regular observations or months and years of tide-dependent research or living.

According to Aldersey-Williams, the concepts of time and tide used to be interchangeable (etymologically as well as otherwise), and the idea of tides as being distinct, time-specific markers for daily ocean fluctuations was a practice that arose later. He then says that he intends to closely observe a 12-hour tidal cycle in order to see at the basic, physical level what sort of changes happen as the waters rise and fall throughout the day. It is around this point that I stopped reading; I'll discuss his observations in the next week's blog post.

Overall I'm really liking both books, and I have to say that at least for now, I've enjoyed reading Carson's work a bit more. Aldersey-Williams is a good writer too, but his style is more conversational and more about his personal experience with the sea. Carson's narrative voice is less personal, but it's exactly that which makes her writing more intimate, because her personality isn't standing between you and her descriptions of the ocean. Although it's a less modern stylistic choice, it resonates with me more.

I'll be blogging again about both books at the same time next week. Stay tuned!

References:

• Aldersey-Williams, H. (2016). The tide: The science and stories behind the greatest force on Earth. New York, NY: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.
• Carson, R. L. (1951). The sea around us (1989 ed.). New York, NY: Oxford University Press, Inc.
• Davidson, K. (1999). Carl Sagan: A life. New York, NY: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.