Life in the seas as it has never been told

Between the 1960s and 1970s, the impact of the massive post-World War II industrialization on the environment became increasingly evident. Many cities in the most advanced nations experienced the effects of pollution on the air, soil and water. In those years, the awareness took shape that something had to be done to curb the excesses of industrialization and reduce its impact on nature. Thus the first environmentalist or ecologists movements were born, particularly inspired by a book published in 1962, Silent Spring , by the American biologist Rachel Carson (1907-1964), a volume that criticized the excessive use of pesticides (in particular DDT) with consequent destruction of natural habitats.

In years when everyone seemed devoted to progress and industrialization without limits, Carson wrote: "The most alarming of man's attacks on the environment is the contamination of the air, land, rivers and seas with dangerous and even lethal materials." And again: " Man is part of nature and his war against nature is inevitably a war against himself ." Words spoken more than sixty years ago that today seem prophetic and that helped transform Rachel Carson into an icon of environmentalism .

Carson was not, however, only an inspiration for the nascent ecological movement. She was first of all a great scholar of nature , a biologist to be precise, and, no less importantly, a great writer . In fact, he knew how to combine competence and talent in narrating as demonstrated by Stories from the depths of the sea (Aboca Edizioni, 2024, pp. 240), a volume published for the first time in 1941 and now offered in the beautiful translation by Isabella Blum.

Let's say right away that it is an out of the ordinary and very fascinating book because it is difficult to think of seeing the sea and the incessant struggle for life that takes place there better than how Rachel Carson managed to make us observe them with her narrative ability and its scientific expertise. Stories from the depths of the sea is a live chronicle of the life of the countless marine creatures that coexist on the shore and underwater, told, as in a novel, by closely observing the stories of three ocean inhabitants, a sandpiper (a bird of the sea), a mackerel and an eel, dramatically intertwined in the continuous ebb and flow of the tides.

Carson first describes coastal life. On the shore of the Atlantic the biologist meets Silverbar, a female sandpiper, on the eve of migration. Every spring, some sandpipers travel about thirteen thousand kilometers and on their return, in autumn, they cover the same distance. These little birds winter south, reaching as far as Patagonia, while in spring they migrate north beyond the Arctic Circle. Then the story moves to the open sea and here we meet another long-distance migrant, Scomber, a mackerel. Carson tells the story from birth until Scomber joins the ranks of marine predators. After spending the summer in a protected port in New England, he and other young people return to wander the open sea where they find new and bigger enemies waiting for them: birds, swordfish, tuna and fishermen... Finally, the story of the American biologist he dives into the darkest depths of the ocean to meet an eel and follow him to the most remote and wonderful places on Earth. Its history began in the distant Sargasso Sea and then moved, with a journey of over fifteen hundred kilometers, to the Atlantic coast. It will enter the bays, go up the rivers, stay there for eight or even ten years, until it reaches physical maturity, when it will then disappear to return to where it came from and go to lay its eggs.

Stories of the daily struggle for survival in the oceans, events which Carson however transforms into universal stories capable of speaking directly to our hearts and minds starting from a simple assumption: even in the vast and mysterious marine expanses we return to the fundamental truth according to which nothing lives on their own.

As the great biologist writes: «Each of these stories seems to me not only to stimulate the imagination but also to offer us a better perspective on human problems. They are about things that have been going on for thousands and thousands of years: ageless, like the sun or the rain or the sea itself. The incessant struggle for survival that takes place at sea epitomizes the struggle fought on Earth by all forms of life, human and non-human. As one reviewer said: 'Our own battles for existence - when we compare them mentally with the incessant ups and downs of life and death that alternate under the winds of the sea - appear to us not so much a cause of dismay as a simple motivation to be strong'".