Surfaces and Depths

Abstract

Surfaces and Depths Jen Hill (bio) "Beginnings are apt to be shadowy." Fifty-five years after its first publication, the opening of Rachel Carson's ambitious natural history of the ocean, The Sea Around Us (1951), states the difficulty of writing environmental history across deep time and reminds us to think about the origins of our own critical engagements (3). It is almost eerie how many early twenty-first century trends in interdisciplinary and intersectional scholarship are anticipated in Carson's best-selling and largely forgotten work of natural history. Often read in concert with Carson's better-known Silent Spring (1962), The Sea Around Us has been of interest to scholars who work on popular science writing, environmental history, and ecocritical and/or ecofeminist narratives, and those engaged in the emergent field of blue humanities. Its suggestive engagements with deep time, questions of scale, extinction, climate change, the Anthropocene, diaspora, and mobility, however, make it useful reading for cultural critics whose methods and interests seemingly have little to do with the ocean, natural history, or the environment. The Sea Around Us opens with an epigraph from the book of Genesis: "And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep." The abridged quotation moves Carson's work firmly into the secular, signaling her ambition to be no less than a rewriting of origins that will necessarily change our understanding of the history that follows from those origins. The result is not only a history of the sea, but a history of the world itself, one that recasts the standard geographies and temporality of world history. In the first fifteen pages, she covers the two and a half billion years since the birth of the planet, shifting the literal grounds of history [End Page 282] from land, continents, societies, and surfaces to ocean, expansiveness, complex ecosystems, and depths. She decenters the human and human achievement, ending her introduction with the human mammal who, having emerged from the sea, returns to know "the truth that his world is a water world … in which the continents are but transient intrusions of land above the surface of the all-encircling sea" (1951, 15). Thus from its first pages, this text signals a radical engagement with temporality and scale of interest to twenty-first century readers seeking models for how to think outside of the instrumental relations, politics, and temporalities associated with late capitalism, extractive economies, and imperialism. Rob Nixon, for example, in Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor, argues that environmental degradation takes place on a timescale that can make its effects invisible and the determination of its causes and any related redress problematically delayed. His introduction cites Carson's Silent Spring as a "catalyst for environmental justice," the source of a "narrative vocabulary"—Carson's description of "death by indirection"—for the dynamics that Johan Galtung would later theorize as "indirect or structural violence" (Nixon 2003, 8–10). The urgency of Silent Spring's tracing of the unanticipated environmental effects of DDT on ecosystems is rehearsed and developed in The Sea Around Us. The chapter "The Birth of an Island," for example, spends eleven of its fifteen pages describing the geologic formation of islands and the various models of their biological populations, "so deliberate, so unhurried, so inexorable" in their development that "[t]o wonder impatiently why man is not a constant witness of such arrivals is to fail to understand the majestic pace of the process" (1951, 89), before dedicating its final four pages to a rush of extinctions of island biodiversity brought about by colonialism (93–97). This brief chapter concretely anticipates theories of island bio-geography (MacArthur and Wilson 1967) and more detailed histories of the violent environmental effects of colonialism (Grove 1996). Carson's description of extinction writes the claims of Silent Spring into a longer history of human environmental impact. Yet perhaps as provocatively, the structure of the chapter enables us to comprehend contemporaneous but entirely different temporalities of geological and biological development across what we have come to call "deep time" and a temporality of human history we associate with the modern. Here and elsewhere, Carson grapples...