Remarks of Moderator Cindy Lee Van Dover

Ifremeria sp., a snail that lives at gold-rich hydrothermal vents. Watercolor; Karen Jacobsen; 2005.






The Way Forward

For those of you who have been to the shore this month, there is sand between the pages of your copy of The Edge of the Sea, and happily so. It should please you further to look forward to September and a discussion led by Patricia Hynes of the book, Lost Woods: The Discovered Writings of Rachel Carson, wherein there is more by Rachel Carson about the edge of the sea, and where Carson reminds us that

‘in the waters of the sea, we are brought back to the fundamental truth that nothing lives to itself. The water itself is altered, in its chemical nature and in its capacity for inducing metabolic change, by the fact that certain organisms have lived within it and by so doing have transmitted to it new properties with powerful and far-reaching effects.’

These words from a scientific paper that Carson presented to the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1953 eloquently capture some of what the scientific community now somewhat pedantically refers to as an ecosystem-based approach.

Public addresses, books, essays, letters… As a gifted and impassioned writer, Carson found myriad ways to share her knowledge of nature with the public and to shape and influence public policy. What about the contemporary environmental scientist – what do we do to advocate for wise environmental stewardship?

I offer a brief outline of a particularly tricky case study that goes beyond the edge of the sea, into the deep sea. In the late 1970’s, scientists discovered hot springs on the seafloor, oases of life colonized by strange and beautiful animals. Thirty-five years later, we continue to explore these wilderness areas, finding every year dozens of new species and, oftentimes, unimagined adaptations for life in extreme environments. These discoveries are the stuff that make new chapters in textbooks and that inspire the next generation of ocean explorers and advocates. Would that strange life were all one might find at these deep-sea hot springs. But

“In the ocean depths, there are mines of zinc, iron, silver and gold, which would be quite easy to exploit.”
— Jules Verne, 1870
Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea

Jules Verne was all too prescient. There is now a rush to mine gold and other precious metals from deep-sea hot springs within territorial waters of other nations, particularly those of island nations in the southwest Pacific. More than one company proposes to begin commercial extraction – pit mining – of metal sulfides that make up the mineral chimneys formed as hot spring fluids exit the seafloor. The method of extraction removes the very habitat that supports the strange animals that I study and is likely to cause collateral damage to the surrounding ecosystem as well. We – the scientific community – have barely begun to discover which species live in these particularly gold-rich environments in the SW Pacific. What we do know comes at a great price and is in large part enabled by field expeditions sponsored by mining companies as they work to meet or even exceed their legal requirements for environmental assessment. Can we begin to assess the impact of mining on the species that live in the threatened habitats and to advise policy makers with informed science?

Here we land squarely at the frustrated interaction between scientists and policy makers that is so cogently described in H. Russell Bernard’s 1974 essay on Scientists and Policy Makers: An Ethnography of Communication (Human Organization 33:261-275) (reprinted by permission of the publisher). Scientists – myself as an example – want to give the yes and no answer, because the issues can be, as in this case, complex, with many unknown and unmeasured variables. We are trained as scientists to specify the limitations of our research, to distinguish what is result and what is interpretation; we are trained to think about the error as well as the mean. Policy makers want to know what is the best course of action to achieve a particular result; insufficient information to make a wise policy decision is not a tenable response.

My own view is that it is premature to mine hot springs for gold. We do not have the ability to assess the environmental impact of sustained and cumulative commercial mining efforts on organisms that colonize seafloor hot springs, nor do we have the means for environmental remediation should mining proceed and insupportable consequences result. I, in a view that I believe is shared by others in the scientific community who study the animals that live at deep-sea hot springs, advocate that a precautionary approach be applied. I take it as our ethical responsibility to maintain the integrity of natural systems; the burden should be on mining advocates to demonstrate that mining will not cause habitat degradation and loss of biodiversity at regional scales.

Week of August 27 – Rachel Carson Book Club members have the opportunity to study how Carson’s work influenced the environmental movement and environmental policy. This leadership comes from her understanding and knowledge of how organisms interact with one another and the environment, as well as a set of values and ethics that places human beings within the context of the environment, rather than apart from it. To all this, Carson added an ability to communicate. What is included in the suite of tools and opportunities that contemporary scientists may use to influence environmental policy? In the particular example of seafloor mining in waters of other nations, what outlets might individuals use to advocate for a particular environmental policy?

Remarks by Moderator Cindy Lee Van Dover

Perception and Value

Perth Amboy, Rahway, Elizabeth City – chemical plants and refineries – these were the sights I associated most with salt marshes as a child growing up in New Jersey, where field trips into New York City took us along this section of the Turnpike corridor. Gas flares set off at the tops of towers, the stink of swamp gas…it seemed a filthy, dreary, worn-out, worthless land, of little use except as a place to dump chemical wastes, to deposit mountains of trash, to fill in, to forget, or better yet, ignore from the start.

And then there is Rachel Carson’s view of a salt marsh:

“a rim of sand held firm by the deep roots of beach grasses – the landward border of the shoal. The burrows of thousands of fiddler crabs riddle the muddy beach on the side facing the marshes. The crabs shuffle across the flats at the approach of an intruder, and the sound of many small chitinous feet is like the crackling of paper. If the tide still has an hour or two to fall to its ebb, one sees only a sheet of water shimmering in the sun.”

In a few lines, Carson gives the marsh texture, depth, motion, sound...and thereby, value; littoral magic that she captures and conveys. Who indeed would not wish to ‘get out and look’, with such prose as inspiration? But one can do even more – one can look, listen, smell, and feel, as Carson shows us time and again in The Edge of the Sea.

I have been to this marsh that Carson describes – it is Town Marsh of Beaufort. Fiddler crabs still abound there by the thousands, in some way descendents of those very crabs that Rachel Carson observed so propitiously. On a summer night I have heard those crabs shuffle. Crackling of paper is a good simile, but it isn’t perfect, for they move in waves when disturbed, so that the rustle of their miniature footsteps (recall each has 8 feet with which to step) is a soft cadence accompanying the lick of the sea as it washes upon the beach. Stand quietly, and the crabs will go back about their business of feeding on the tiny organisms that live in the mud where they make their burrows. Then the sound shifts to a chorus of uncountable whispered slurps.

I cannot say precisely how my concept of salt marshes shifted from the Turnpike marsh to Town Marsh, but shift it did, and decidedly, before I entered high school. What factors elicit watershed changes in individual attitudes about nature, in defiance in this case, of the evidence before me as a child? There is a new field of study called ‘Conservation Psychology’. The website for this fledgling discipline defines conservation psychology as “the scientific study of the reciprocal relationships between humans and the rest of nature and of how one can influence public discourse to produce enduring behavioral change.” Happy thought, that one can discover scientifically, what Rachel Carson accomplished artistically. If I had the freedom to hire new faculty at will, this is a field in which I would invest.

In The Edge of the Sea, Rachel Carson promotes the concept of coastal preservation and an ‘estuarine-protection imperative’, affirming, as Siry says, ‘the human psychic need to find its identity in relationship to surrounding land and water’(1). This coming to terms with the sea – or its edge – is not new, nor is it finished, especially with a sea that is forever changing, and changing now as a consequence of our own actions. Alain Corbin, Professor of History at the Sorbonne (University of Paris I), provides a cultural backdrop to our view of the sea in his book The Lure of the Sea: the Discovery of the Seaside 1750-1840 (1988, published by Penguin Books in 1995). I am not scholar enough to cogently summarize this work in a brief paragraph, but follow the prospect in the chapter titles in Parts I, Unconsciousness and the First Premises of Desire, and II, The Pattern of a New Pleasure:

1. The Roots of Fear and Repulsion
2. First Steps Toward Admiration
3. A New Harmony Between the Body and the Sea
4. Penetrating the World’s Enigmas
5. The Freshness of Wonder
6. The Ephemeral Journey

Part III (The Growing Complexity of the Social Spectacle) concludes with chapters on The Pathos of the Shores and Inventing the Beach.

Altogether Cobain leads us along the path where art, literature, and society work to change the view of the seashore from a place of horror to a place that we destroy with our love.

Suggested Discussion, Week of August 20 – How we perceive the edge of the sea: What value does Rachel Carson give to this narrow zone that separates land and ocean? How do these values transcend the east-coast setting of The Edge of the Sea? How well do our current sensibilities about development and use of coastal zones map to these values?

(1) J.V. Siry, Marshes of the Ocean Shore: Development of an Ecological Ethic. Texas A&M University Press, 1984.

Remarks by Moderator Cindy Lee Van Dover

Word Pictures and Figurative Language in The Edge of the Sea

Sponges - "their appearance suggest nothing of the activity that goes on within their dark bulks" ...RC


In The Edge of the Sea, Rachel Carson set about to make the reader appreciate organisms unfamiliar to the casual observer and belonging to creatures not altogether appealing as cast in classical literature. Consider for example, the morbid reference to terrestrial worms in Andrew Marvell’s "To His Coy Mistress" (17th century):

But at my back I always hear
Time’s winged chariot hurrying near;
And yonder before us lie
Deserts of vast eternity
Thy beauty shall no more be found
Nor, in thy marble vault, shall sound
My echoing song: then worms shall try
That long-preserved virginity,
And into ashes all my lust:
The grave’s a fine and private place,
But none, I think, do there embrace.

T.S. Eliot offers a somewhat sympathetic view of organisms living at the edge of the sea in "The Love Song of J. Alfred Profrock" (1917). They are at least cast as a curiosity, though when I read these lines, I am left with a sense of futility of human nature in the face of the quiet and stubborn persistence of other forms of life.

The sea is the land’s edge also, the granite
Into which it reaches, the beaches where it tosses
Its hints of earlier and other creation:
The starfish, the hermit crab, the whale’s backbone;
The pools where it offers to our curiosity
The more delicate algae and the sea anemone.
It tosses up our losses, the torn seine,
The shattered lobsterpot, the broken oar
And the gear of foreign dead men. The sea has many voices.

Consider the challenge of popularizing the beauty of estuaries where they have been reviled. When Rachel Carson wrote The Edge of the Sea, reclamation, not preservation, was the action dominating the progressive agendas of coastal towns with salt marshes and other wetlands. Tidal creeks and estuaries were places for dumping and filling.

Joseph Siry, in Marshes of the Ocean Shore: Development of an Ecological Ethic (1984, Texas A&M University Press) credits Carson with leadership in advocating for preservation of the ecological integrity of the seashore on scientific, aesthetic, and practical grounds through her writings. How does Carson achieve this leadership?

There is the whole, the sum of books like The Edge of the Sea, and there are the parts, where Carson uses simple prose to engage the reader, to take the most humble organism and make it mysterious and interesting. Consider how Carson brings the loggerhead sponge into a scale relative to that of a person and promises to reveal a secret inner life that is strange:

Massive and inert, the loggerhead sponges by their appearance suggest nothing of the activity that goes on within their dark bulks. There is no sign of life for the casual passer-by to read, although if he waited and watched long enough he might sometimes see the deliberate closing of some of the round openings, large enough to admit an exploring finger, that penetrate the upper flat surface. These and other openings are the key to the nature of the giant sponge …

Sue Hubbell, whose introduction graces the 1998 Mariner Books edition of The Edge of the Sea, follows in Rachel Carson’s footsteps in Waiting for Aphrodite: Journeys into the Time Before Bones (1999, Houghton Mifflin):

Sponges “…are layered masses of specialized cells that function in a seemingly muddled way. Yet their way of life is efficient and complex. And they have been at it for a much longer time than most other animals that we think of as having exciting lives.”

It is perhaps not fair to set these excerpts side by side, so I urge readers to study each author’s passage about sponges in their full and complete context. I am convinced that sponges are one of the most difficult creatures on Earth to make compelling to the novice naturalist. (I exclude from this claim the sponges of tropical waters, that attract the eye with their splashes of vivid colors). Carson succeeds in drawing me further into her prose through her blunt admission that sponges do indeed seem to be rather boring, but they hold secrets that she can reveal, if one reads on just a bit further.

Week of August 13 – Word pictures and figurative language: The Edge of the Sea is filled with word pictures, similes, and sensory perceptions. Keep a mental logbook of your favorites and share the best one. Explain why it works so well, how it engages the reader.

Opening Remarks by Moderator Cindy Lee Van Dover

The Rachel Carson National Estuarine Research Reserve
Foreground: Duke Univ. Marine Laboratory

Left: Town of Beaufort, NC
Right: RCERR
Far right: Shackleford Bank

The view from the window of my office where I write looks onto Carrot Island and Bird Shoal. These beach grass- and cedar-covered sand spits belong to the Rachel Carson National Estuarine Research Reserve and are part of the ‘inner banks’ of coastal North Carolina, at the edge of the sea. My link to this sandy margin goes back three decades, when I camped for a summer at one apex of the triangle that links Carrot Island, the town of Beaufort, and Pivers Island. Rachel Carson wrote of these North Carolina shores in the Edge of the Sea. I have slept beside fiddler crabs, waded among knobbed whelks, floated above parchment worms, and am otherwise familiar with the habits and habitats of the organisms that populate The Edge of the Sea.

My copy of the The Edge of the Sea is a worn and yellowed paperback, broken-spined. My name written on the inside cover is of a fine size and precision that I can no longer match. The 95¢ price tag further marks it as a book purchased decades ago, when I first devoured it as a summer student of marine biology in my New Jersey high school. It is a book that stayed with me during my college summers at a Rutgers University research laboratory on Delaware Bay, where I was apprenticed to nature on the tidal flats. My copy has traveled with me around the country, from New Jersey to Florida, California to Alaska. Among the papers tucked inside its pages are receipts from a 2005 trip to Porquerolles (FR), testimony that even in recent years it is a volume I turn to for inspiration.

I could never warm to Under the Sea-Wind, nor did The Sea Around Us truly capture my attention. Of the Carson triptych of books about the marine world, it was The Edge of the Sea that fed my desire to know more about how the strange organisms that live on the seashore survive. It is little wonder that when I set about trying to describe the strange life that I came to know beyond the edge of the sea , I kept Carson’s book at my desk while I worked and gave nod to her influence in my own career on the first page of the introduction.

The enduring nature of Rachel Carson’s narratives in The Edge of the Sea intrigues me, draws me to her prose to discover how she achieves this. The August RC Book Club discussions begin with explorations of what gives power to her writing. I use as my guide to this topic John A. Murray’s excellent Nature Writing Handbook: A Creative Guide (Sierra Club Books 1995). Murray credits Thoreau as the pioneer of the narrative tradition that translates technical information into a meditation on the essence of nature. According to Murray, the risk for the novice writer is ‘the disappearing narrator’, where technical information overwhelms the storyline. Where Carson disappears from the narrative in The Edge of the Sea, it is only to allow the narrative of the organisms to take first place, if not first person.

Rachel Carson’s prose may be at its best in the first chapter of The Edge of the Sea – The Marginal World – where she takes us with her to the shore. It is a chapter that begins with eloquence and promise: “The edge of the sea is a strange and beautiful place." It is a chapter filled with perceptions of movement: on a single page wind blows over the water, waves crash on the beach, a ghost crab waits and watches, an egret wades with stealthy, hesitant motion, and oysters grip mangrove roots. The prose mirrors the cadence of the ebb and flow of the tide, land becomes sea, sea becomes land; Carson meditates on the essence of nature and the spectacle of life that appears, evolves, and – sometimes – disappears.

Week of August 6 – Finding the ‘I’: Where and how does Rachel Carson use the first person narrative most effectively in The Edge of the Sea? Why does it work? Browse through your shelf of Carson books – where else do you find effective use of the first person in her prose?

AUGUST SCHEDULE

Moderator for August: Professor Cindy Lee Van Dover, Director, Duke University Marine Laboratory, Beaufort, North Carolina

Background
The Edge of the Sea was originally conceived as a practical field guide to the seashore life of the east coast – a reference book to aid intrepid explorers of tide pools, sandy beaches, mudflats, and reefs. A residual compendium of major groups of microorganisms, plants, and animals persists as an appendix.But as Mark Lytle describes in The Gentle Subversive, Rachel Carson’s vision for the book evolved as the project proceeded. It was not enough to list names and describe peculiarities of one organism after another. Instead, Carson uses her mastery of the narrative essay, rich in figurative language and word pictures, to describe life at the edge of the sea. She draws us into this tidal world, makes us want to see, touch, listen, to discover the myriad ways in which the lives of sea creatures and their environment are intertwined.

Discussion Topics
The enduring nature of Rachel Carson’s narratives intrigues me, draws me to her prose to discover how she achieves this. The August RC Book Club discussions will begin with explorations of what gives power to her writing. I use as my guide to this topic John A. Murray’s excellent Nature Writing Handbook: A Creative Guide (Sierra Club Books 1995; Rev. ed. U. of NM Press 2003).

Week of August 6 – Finding the ‘I’: Where and how does Rachel Carson use the first person narrative most effectively in The Edge of the Sea? Why does it work? Browse through your shelf of Carson books – where else do you find effective use of the first person in her prose?

Week of August 13 – Word pictures and figurative language: The Edge of the Sea is filled with word pictures, similes, and sensory perceptions. Keep a logbook of your favorites and share the best one. Explain why it works so well, how it engages the reader. We will then consider perceptions of the contemporary seashore, while looking back through time for a glimpse of how these perceptions have evolved. There are undoubtedly many scholarly volumes on this topic. One I was recently introduced to is The Lure of the Sea: The Discovery of the Seaside 1750-1840 by Alain Corbin (1994 U. of CA Press; Penguin Books in 1995).

Week of August 20 – How we perceive the edge of the sea: What value does Rachel Carson give to this narrow zone that separates land and ocean? How do these values transcend the east-coast setting of The Edge of the Sea? How well do our current sensibilities about development and use of coastal zones map to these values? Our final week of discussion will indulge my interests in how contemporary scientists and policy-makers interact, as a context for appreciating the magnitude of Rachel Carson’s achievements in the environmental movement. In initiating this discussion, I will draw from a 1974 scholarly article by H. Russell Bernard entitled “Scientists and Policy Makers: An Ethnography of Communication” (Human Organization 23:261-275) (posted by permission from the publisher) and then look the environmental program at my home institution for examples of ways in which the gap between science and policy can be narrowed.

Week of August 27 – Rachel Carson Centennial Blog readers have the opportunity to study how Carson’s work influenced the environmental movement and environmental policy. This leadership comes from her understanding and knowledge of how organisms interact with one another and the environment, as well as a set of values and ethics that places human beings within the context of the environment, rather than apart from it. To all this, Carson added an ability to communicate. What is included in the suite of tools that contemporary scientists must use to influence environmental policy?

Submitted by Cindy Lee Van Dover