Review: Erik Reece on Rachel Carson

It was sitting on a Florida beach some years ago, reading Rachel Carson’s The Edge of the Sea, that I learned the quartzite sand all around me had once belonged to the Appalachian Mountains, whose destruction due to strip mining I had been writing about for a decade. In my mind, this astonishing fact bound me in some small, symbolic way to one of the greatest American environmental writers.

Rachel Carson was born on May 27, 1907, sixty years to the day before my own entre into the world near those very mountains—another link. Thirty-eight years later, she was hiking the northern spine of the Appalachians, mindful of the Precambrian seas that once covered these mountains, when she wrote this sentence in her notebook: “Now I lie back with half closed eyes and try to realize that I am at the bottom of another ocean—an ocean of air on which the hawks are sailing.” Even in the mountains, Rachel Carson was dreaming of the sea.