Rachel Carson and the Development of Earth Stewards

Early on in her book, Under the Sea-Wind, Rachel Carson gives us the following brief summary of what ocean life is like for the creatures who inhabit it:How can anyone connect to such a world as described in this story—an amoral world in which eat and be eaten is the storyline? The answer, implies Carson, lies in the cyclical nature of the story—from beach fleas being hunted by a ghost crab to beach fleas eating the remains of a channel bass, remains that were, in a material sense, the reincarnation of the ghost crab—a cycle that elicits in us a sense of wonder.In this brief story, we also see Carson’s ocean-centric way of understanding, a way that adopts not the perspectives of humans but those of the ocean creatures themselves and of ocean elements such as tides. Furthermore, we see in this ocean-centric way of understanding, not a sentimental analogizing from human experience but a deep understanding of the behavior of ocean creatures and ocean elements, an understanding born, no doubt, of countless hours of observation and research.Finally, we see Carson’s ethical-spiritual perspective on the natural world—in the way she combines the language of science with its emphasis on facts and intimations of the spiritual themes of reincarnation and interdependence—themes that make it more likely that readers will have an experience that generates their caring for the natural world.Stepping back, we see here the three main ways that Rachel Carson shows herself to be a highly developed earth steward—first, in the way she experiences the natural world as asource of wonder; second, in the decentered way she knows and understands the natural world from the point of view of its creatures and elements, as they work together to make up complex systems carrying out complex processes, and third, in her implied ethical-spiritual perspective on the natural world, one that provides strong motivation to care for the natural world. Let us take up each of these ways in turn, and see how they work separately and together to explain not only the development of Rachel Carson as an earth steward but also the development of earth stewards everywhere.Perhaps no other environmentalist is associated more with the word wonder than is Rachel Carson. From early on in her childhood right up to her final days, wonder took center stage in her talk and experience of the natural world. This could be expected, for, as a child, she was mentored by her mother, Maria, who embodied that era’s nature study movement, a movement that sought to connect children to nature by first cultivating a sense of wonder in nature through hands on experience in nature. The movement took as its mantra the words of the famous 19th century biologist and geologist, Louis Agassiz (n.d.), who once said “Study nature, not books.”Experiencing wonder through direct experience with nature was central throughout Carson’s development as an earth steward—from her childhood days in the woods with her mother up through her final days exploring the coastline near her beloved summer retreat in Maine. But that experience of wonder did not remain the same. It developed—as she herself implied in her book, The Sense of Wonder, while relating a charming story of she and her grandnephew, Roger, then a toddler, experiencing the wonders of a stormy sea at night:With respect to Carson’s experience of wonder and its development, with development, the sources of wonder included not simply nor mainly what Roger experienced through his senses. The sources also included Carson’s knowledge and understanding of a vast and marvelous biodiversity and a history of astounding geological events. For example, no one who reads her The Sea Around Us can escape this sense of wonder in her account of our moon’s origin, its once being a giant mass ripped from the earth to form a crater that was eventually filled with water to create the Pacific ocean.1The development of Carson’s sense of wonder is also evident in the ways she came to combine the language common in scientific explanations with the language of expression common in literary works. To understand what this means, consider, for example, Shakespeare’s words for capturing the feelings and experience of a sunrise: “But look, the morn in russet mantle clad, walks o’er the dew of yon high eastern hill”4 (Shakespeare & Herford, 2016). Now consider Carson’s words for explaining springtime in the Northern Hemisphere:How like Shakespeare’s sunrise, for here, as in Shakespeare’s play, what literally are nature’s motions become, with Carson’s use of expressive language, nature’s actions—as spring dons the role of a godlike figure magically transforming a barren and still landscape into a veritable ballet and symphony of living creatures. There is wonder here, but not the wonder we saw in Carson’s grandnephew Roger. Now, Carson and nature are the coauthors of wonder—a collaboration that instills in us a shared understanding of nature as a source of wonder.For this kind of writing and explaining, Carson was sometimes criticized for abandoning the scientific perspective to adopt a literary one—as if a literary perspective weakens or even corrupts the scientific perspective. To this criticism, Carson responded:Her response is telling. It shows us something about her being a highly developed earth steward, namely, that far from adopting a dour, stoic, positivist perspective on the natural world, as a developed earth steward she combined the literal and the expressive to adopt a dramatic, personalized, but highly informative perspective on the natural world, one that embraced the sense of wonder as being as real as any fact found in a scientific journal.Finally, the experience and meaning of wonder developed in Carson to the extent that it more and more took on ethical-spiritual meaning, a meaning that developed over time and had to do with Carson’s later experiencing the natural world as offering ways to sustain us emotionally and spiritually. For example, in The Sense of Wonder, she wrote.In short, wonder was a major pillar in Rachel Carson’s becoming an earth steward—even as that pillar grew and developed in relation to the other pillars.What can we say about the development of Carson’s knowing and understanding of the natural world? Obviously, her development is marked by the accumulation of facts that led to her knowing and understanding the natural world in more informed ways—this is obvious. It is equally obvious that what developed were her more powerful ways of thinking analytically—from thinking as a child in terms of “this causes that” and “this is good (or bad)” to thinking in terms of multiple causes (multivariate analysis) and different types of causes (domino, cyclical, two-way, etc.) and dilemmas (e.g., around the use of pesticides) that make evaluating good and bad both complex and fraught with ambiguities.In addition to this development of analytic thinking, Carson’s knowing and understanding developed as a consequence of the development of different ways for knowing. Her own intuitive understanding of how developing knowledge and understanding has to do with different ways of knowing is revealed in what she had to say about her mentoring her grandnephew, Roger. As we have already seen in the example reported in The Sense of Wonder, Carson mentored the toddler Roger by supporting his presymbolic ways of knowing and understanding nature—his knowing and understanding through his senses of sight and sound (the sight and sound of the stormy ocean). Later, when Roger was four, Carson mentored Roger by supporting his emerging symbolic ways of knowing, including symbols for pretending—as she played a game with him pretending that different little seedlings found on the forest floor might be the Christmas trees of different animals, depending on the match between the size of the seedling and animal. She wrote:Here, Carson intuitively grasps the fact that engaging Roger in fantasy play might foster Roger’s knowing and understanding nature. Indeed, during this time she was engaging Roger in fantasy play around nature, he was happily absorbing all the many names she was sharing (not teaching) of the myriad plants and creatures found in the forest. Symbolizing in fantasy play about the natural world was, in other words, a motivator and means to digest the information being shared about the natural world—an often overlooked function in fantasy play, this function of fantasy play for digesting information (Scarlett, 2005, pp. 5173). If we can assume that Carson was repeating a method practiced by her own mother when she was about four, then we have here an account of her own early development as an earth steward—from knowing through the senses only to knowing through symbolizing found in language and pretense.Still later, as a budding biologist, we see qualitatively different ways of symbolizing for understanding the natural world (graphs, diagrams, abstract constructs, etc.)—all ways of symbolizing in the service of creating logical arguments and presentations of evidence—all presenting a kind of symbolizing that goes beyond simply referring to what can be directly perceived, but, unlike fantasizing, ways that provide understanding of the complex systems and processes that explain how nature functions. And still later, when she was writing her three monumental books on the ocean, we see her symbolizing in ways reminiscent of early fantasy play but having a quite different and more advanced structure—narrative ways that tell the many stories found in nature, that make nature more understandable to all.With all these developments in Carson’s knowing and understanding the natural world came the remarkable array of details in her explanations about the lives of particular creatures, plants, and the earth’s elements, her knowing and understanding about how the natural world works—how birds use a series of barrier islands (Plum Island, Assateage Island, etc.) up and down the east coast of North America to provide needed resting spots during their migrations, how islands are formed in the ocean by upward thrusts of volcanoes, how the Sargasso Sea sustains life— the list goes on and on. But there is more to the development of Carson’s knowing and understanding than is contained in the list. What developed over time and what made Carson’s knowing and understanding so special was her ability to see the “whole” while explaining the parts. This was shown in two ways in particular: first in her storytelling and second in what might be called her developing an ecosystems paradigm for explaining.With regard to her storytelling, Carson told stories filled with knowledge about geology, biology, and the history of humans’ effects on the natural world. But in the storytelling, we never get lost in the details, and the facts are never what is featured. What is featured are the meanings in the narrative. For example, in her telling the story of how islands in the ocean were formed and how life on these islands evolved, the meaning in the narrative turns out to be that islands, in having their own distinct evolution, are vulnerable to being seriously damaged after humans arrive with their goats, plants from the mainland, and accompanying rats. We need to realize that to know and understand islands, we need to know and understand the dramatic impact that humans have had on islands—an impact that has not been kind to islands. This is just one of many narratives that Carson spun about the natural world—each bringing a wealth of facts together to tell a story with a distinct and significant overall meaning.With regard to Carson’s developing an ecosystems paradigm for giving us the “whole” as she explained the parts, the significance of the paradigm might best be understood in referencing two complementary paradigms framing today’s discussions of climate change. If Carson lived today, she would, no doubt, be writing about carbon emissions and the need to wean ourselves of dependence on fossil fuels. But given her long-standing interest in ecosystems, her focus would likely be even more on restoring ecosystems and supporting the mechanisms nature itself has developed, over millions of years, to control temperature and to make for a livable planet.4 This ecosystems paradigm emphasizes the ways that living plants and animals work together to pull carbon from the atmosphere and sequester carbon in soil—all necessary for the maintenance of a world fit for life.The importance of Carson’s developing an ecosystems paradigm for knowing and understanding is nowhere better seen than in her final book, Silent Spring, where time and time again she shows us how nature’s ecosystems function not only for the best interests of nonhumans but also for humans’ long-term interests as well. We see this paradigm working in her explaining how replacing sagebrush with grasslands upsets a natural system and leads to grasslands eventually becoming barren lands of rocks and dust. And we see this paradigm again in her explaining how blanket spraying to kill roadside vegetation has destroyed ecosystems that serve many useful purposes. Over and over, her ecosystem’s paradigm is employed to explain nature and the threats to nature’s well-being.In sum, we see in Rachel Carson’s development as an earth steward, transformations in the way she knew and understood the natural world—in the development from presymbolic to analytic ways knowing, in the development of new ways of symbolizing, and in the development of ways to understand and give us the “big picture,” the whole.As many have noted, Rachel Carson’s ethical perspective toward the natural world was rooted in her personal experiences with nature, experiences filled with a sense of wonder. From a life-long cultivation of experiencing wonder, Carson developed a nonanthropocentric perspective and appreciation for the intrinsic value of life and nature in other words, for Carson, wonder and care in and she to make wonder and care work together for as have also that Rachel Carson’s ethical perspective toward the natural world was rooted in her life-long of knowledge about the natural world. her time working at the and this of knowledge into knowledge about the biodiversity and the many complex systems of that our and And Carson’s ethical perspective on the natural world came more and more to caring for the many ecosystems that make for a livable and as have noted, Rachel Carson’s ethical perspective had a even that from the natural of 19th century thinking which that in nature’s and we can experience the and of the We see in her ethical-spiritual perspective where not only of natural but also of her mentoring mother, Maria, who was herself the of a as as the of the nature study movement, which itself with the development of good but also with cultivating a natural way of understanding and experiencing Carson’s and this natural way of understanding and experiencing nature she of her having a natural perspective on as is evident in her response to a with her She sum, from early on to her final days, a sense of the was there in Carson’s experience of nature, no doubt, it her work to make caring for nature a for all of beyond her having of experiencing the when experiencing nature and its marvelous there is the development of her spiritual way of humans nature. book, The Sense of the like Carson, in our and direct with the natural world the for becoming an earth steward, an that has in common with Carson’s experience of wonder, and one that as sometimes into an experience of the no that Carson had those of experiencing not simply wonder, but also something also provides an one that gives us a way to explain what developed in the development of Carson’s ethical-spiritual perspective on the natural world. that experiencing the when experiencing the natural world can strong feelings of on the This experience of on a or nature as an experience of being on a that has our best interests in of a But with development, that can we to realize that not about nature is good for humans Furthermore, the experience of and as we realize the and we have to on the natural world. This of development Carson and it is evident when she about the natural world in her later years, a time in her life when she was becoming that humans were on a godlike role that can only to her development from a experience of the as there to us and make us For example, in her later and in a to her she Carson’s words, we can of words and that if humans only in their own so will to and also provides a way of understanding Carson’s ethical-spiritual development in terms of where she came to herself in her to the natural world and the between and nature is quite different for different who an experience of There are those who themselves from nature and themselves near to being by themselves to be godlike and having over nature. in this way of there are those who themselves to nature by the role of those who are with caring for nature as a from in his provides one example of this way of humans nature and as stewards of a way of understanding where humans can a way that he would, no doubt, to Carson. This way humans as in nature, creatures who are not nature but who in of As creatures other creatures and elements, humans not by being or godlike nor by being can be called but by being who are to make in with that can to the or to the of our livable all that has been said here about the development of Carson’s ethical-spiritual perspective on the natural world the that her development as an earth steward be understood not only in terms of the development of wonder, knowing, and an ethical-spiritual also in terms of how these three came to be into one powerful and a personal the we have to be caring in a natural world that has intrinsic and not just one that us to make that can the interests of humans and those of the of the natural remains to be out is a way of understanding how Carson’s development as an earth steward how earth stewards This is not an the of a of the development of earth stewards been at has not been and in ways that the of us to do more than It also us to the qualitatively different ways that experience wonder, explain that nature of nature, and make and spiritual for caring for the natural world. But there is here in Carson’s development to at get on this of a of Carson’s development as an earth steward us to not with the facts of nature but with nature’s to wonder, a kind of wonder if will to care for nature. is in today’s For example, here is a the being when to children exploring and in nature, he experience in nature is a nature Carson’s development as an earth steward shows that for earth stewards to they need to knowledge and understanding that a one that leads to an understanding of humans as in a vast and complex natural world, a world that can be seriously damaged by humans if humans do not take care of the natural knowledge and understanding need through becoming a or Carson’s developing as a and is not what is There after earth stewards the of and a of other But what they all have in common is the fact that they their and the needed to their in being earth had to the needed to and trees in to in to his of high that the and led to the a had to about and developing the use of on an in short, what up the of being a for the of his own feelings and experience of the natural world with the he was that connect us more and more to the natural world. The list of and in their special and their special work to be earth is but in each developed earth steward, of or work we these themes of knowledge and Carson’s development as an earth steward us the need for developing an ethical-spiritual one that can be even in of and when powerful and are on the natural world. The ethical-spiritual perspective that is shared by all developed earth stewards has at its respect for the intrinsic and of the that animals, plants, not only a sense of but also a sense of to care for the natural world. This is for developed earth stewards of We it in Carson writing from her on the and we it around the world in of through and to working to natural and all we in the development of earth stewards a shared ethical-spiritual perspective that emphasizes wonder, and care for the natural with respect to the development of earth stewards we see Carson’s development as an earth steward being by her what was, early only and namely, that the natural world is and that the natural world is filled with that has an ethical-spiritual This way of thinking about development is reminiscent of words in his to on is telling us about the development of earth stewards is that even children can have an intuitive understanding and appreciation of the natural world and its ethical-spiritual that with development more advanced ways of that make what was only understood and in the there a developed earth climate the discussions of the and the we are to the natural world. And today, as never we realize that the of our and on children and becoming earth this at a time when today’s of children and are more from nature than were children from to and around to in the of many children and in where nature means a many children and do not know what of children and namely, that nature is where one can to experience play, where natural can be to with and where can be to and many children and are having experiences that for the for with and caring for the natural world. To get our and to the to this as so one might is it to the development of earth stewards if so many of today’s children and are from there are countless at work to provide to this that not only children and to the natural world, but also that provide for becoming earth forest days at for list is and And and are to earth emerging There developments in the of for the development of the of earth short, there is to and if she were today, Rachel Carson would as she the of the humans are on the Carson only she saw the natural world as and but also she saw us humans as still of experiencing nature’s wonders and nature’s ways of a sense of as she herself made in her when the