Rachel Carson Dreams of the Sea

The New Yorker Radio Hour

WNYC Studios and The New Yorker

Politics, Arts, News, Wnyc, Books, David, Storytelling, Society & Culture, Yorker, New, Remnick

4.2 • 6.2K Ratings

🗓️ 21 April 2020

⏱️ 18 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Before she published “Silent Spring,” one of the most influential books of the last century, Rachel Carson was a young aspiring poet and then a graduate student in marine biology. Although she couldn’t swim and disliked boats, Carson fell in love with the ocean. Her early books—including “The Sea Around Us,” “The Edge of the Sea” and “Under the Sea Wind”—were like no other nature writing of their time, Jill Lepore says: Carson made you feel you were right there with her, gazing into the depths of a tide pool or lying in a cave lined with sea sponges. Lepore notes that Carson was wondering about a warming trend in the ocean as early as the 1940s, and was planning to explore it after the publication of “Silent Spring.” If she had not died early, of cancer, could Carson have brought climate change to national attention well before it was too late? Excerpts from Carson’s work were read by Charlayne Woodard, and used with permission of Carson’s estate. This segment was originally broadcast on September 14, 2018.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.
0:10.0	Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick.
0:13.5	This week is the 50th anniversary of the first Earth Day in April 1970.
0:19.7	We're going to remember Rachel Carson.
0:22.7	Probably more than any other person,
0:25.2	Carson helped to launch the environmental movement
0:27.6	as we know it today,
0:29.2	and it came with her book Silent Spring.
0:31.7	But Carson's earlier writings,
0:34.0	also published in The New Yorker,
0:36.1	contained the seeds of what made her so influential.
0:39.9	Here's Carson, speaking in 1951.
0:43.7	I seem to have been born with a fascination for the sea.
0:47.6	For years before I ever saw it, I thought about it, dreamed about it, and wondered what
0:52.8	it could be like.
0:54.8	Carson's writings about the sea were filled with a sense of wonder and poetry.
0:59.4	Here's actress Charlene Woodard, reading Rachel Carson.
1:03.8	In midsummer, life in the surface water slacks to a slower pace.
1:09.8	The red jellyfish, Sienia, usually has grown from the size of a thimble to that of an umbrella.
1:16.7	This great jellyfish moves through the sea with rhythmic pulsations, trailing long tentacles,
1:22.7	and as likely as not, shepherding a little group of young cod or haddock,
1:28.0	which find shelter under its bell and travel with it.
	...

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