Knowledge here is not celebrated just for itself but as a key to what Buddhists might call 'right action'. This is no accident Carson is concerned that we take action to protect these delicate ecosystems and realises that to encourage this she needs to help us understand their importance to us and to everything else.

'There is,' as she writes, 'no drop of water in the ocean, not even in the deepest part of the abyss, that does not know and respond to the mysterious forces that create the tide.' This sense of the sea and all its constituents as part of an interrelated system infuses the entire book.īy giving clear expression to the interrelatedness of land, air, sea and the pull of sun and moon, The Sea Around Us transcends mere nature writing and becomes a work of ecology. The reader is immersed in a new and wonderful world, one where everything really is connected to everything else.

There is none of the wallowing in anthropomorphic inaccuracy that mars much popular nature writing and the science is lucidly explained without leaving out the hard bits.

Carson avoids the temptation to patronise either the reader or the world she is bringing to life. The second book is a quiet tour de force. This first book was a critical but not a commercial success and disappeared until the success of The Sea Around Us brought it back into print. It wasn't her first attempt at capturing the oceans between the covers of a book 10 years earlier she had published Under the Sea Wind, a set of short stories in which sea life is narrated through the eyes of birds and fish. You're unlikely to find anything better than Rachel Carson's 1951 The Sea Around Us, the first, and still perhaps the best science bestseller. However, if, like me, you're no expert, you'll need a guide to take along, someone who knows the science of the sea and can communicate it clearly and alluringly. A trip to the seaside is an opportunity to contemplate the sea in all its multifaceted glory. It's a zone of interchange between the three great planetary ecosystems of earth, air and ocean and one which played a crucial role in the evolution of life itself. For me, the inevitable summertime trip to the beach is not about any of these things it's an opportunity to inhabit, however briefly, the margin where land and sea engage in a constant, ever-changing relationship that is one of the great drivers of life on, and the life of, the planet. Sunbathing bores me, I'm too old to build sandcastles, and I neither swim nor surf.

The Sea Around Us by Rachel Carson