Lost Woods

by Rachel Carson

  The glades buggy that was waiting for us was a wonderful conveyance. It was built something like a tractor, with six pairs of very large wheels. Its engine was completely naked and exposed, and during the trip blasted its heat on the three of us perched on the buggy’s single seat. There were various tools – pliers, screwdrivers, etc. – in a little rack against the motor block, and from time to time Mr. Poppenhager leaned out as we jogged along and turned something or jabbed at the motor. It seemed to be in a perpetual state of boiling over; and now and then Mr. P. would stop and get out with a tin can and dip up some water – there was water everywhere – and pour it into the radiator. Usually he would drink a little – “the best water in the world” he would say.

  But as I said a while ago, there was a curious sense of the sea there in the heart of the Everglades. At first I couldn’t analyze it but I felt it strongly. There is first of all a sense of immense space from the utter flatness of the land and the great expanse of sky. The feeling of space is almost the same as at sea. The cloud effects were beautiful and always changing, and rain came over the grass, making a beautiful soft play of changing color – all grey and soft green. And again I found myself remembering rain at sea, dimpling the soft grey sheet of water. And in the Everglades the coral rock is always cropping out – underlying the water and raised in jagged boulders among the grass. Once that rock was formed by coral animals, living in a shallow sea that covered this very place. There is today the feeling that the land has formed only the thinnest veneer over this underlying platform of the ancient sea – that at any time the relations of sea and land might again be reversed.

  And as we traveled from one to another of the “hammocks” of palmetto and other trees that rise here and there in the great sea of grass, we thought irresistibly of islands in the ocean. Except for scattered cypresses, all the trees of this part of the Everglades are concentrated in the hammocks, which form where depressions in the rock accumulate a little soil. Everywhere else there is only rock, water, and grass. The hammocks are famous for their tree snails, which live on certain locust-like trees, feeding on mossy growths on the bark. The shells of the tree snails are brightly colored, with an amazing variety of patterns. They are so much sought by collectors that the more accessible hammocks have been stripped bare. On our steaming iron monster, we rode along through the hammocks, passing under the trees and picking off tree snails, as in childhood we used to snatch the iron rings on a merry-go-round.

  During the day we went calling on several alligators known by Mr. Poppenhager to inhabit certain “holes.” The first one was not at home; the second was. He was apparently out in his front yard, but at our approach he went crashing through the willows and into his pond. In the Everglades, a “ ’gator hole” is typically a water-filled depression in the middle of a small hammock. Usually there is a rocky cave in the floor of this pond to which the alligator can retreat.

  The Everglades is, of course, the land of the Seminole Indians. Far in the interior of the Glades we visited the sites of two ancient Indian villages. Some of these are being studied by archeologists who have found evidence of early tribes who antedated the Seminoles by several hundred years. Near one of the modern settlements, Mr. Poppenhager took us to visit an Indian grave. Because of the solid limestone floor of this whole region, there is no burial in the ordinary sense; the coffin is placed on the ground and the man is given his gun and other equipment he will need for his life in the next world.

  To us the whole area seemed as trackless and as lacking in landmarks as the sea, but our guide knew exactly where he was going. Our only bad moments came late in the afternoon, when there began to be some question whether we had enough gas to get us back to the Trail. Mosquitoes had been with us all day, settling in clouds every time we stopped moving. So the thought of a night in the swamp wasn’t pleasant. However, we made it about dusk, just as the Game Warden and the Fish and Wildlife patrolman were beginning to line up cars along the Trail to guide us back by their headlights.

  That Fish and Wildlife patrolman was such an unforgettable character that I must tell you a little about him before we leave the Everglades. As Service patrolman for the area, it was his job to protect the birds and alligators and other wildlife from being molested. That meant he had to live far out in a wild part of the Everglades, where days went by without his seeing another person. The Service had had trouble filling the job. There were few men that would have taken it; and perhaps no one else as beautifully fitted for it as Mr. Finneran. He was tired of the northern cities where he had spent most of his life, and for about ten years he had known this wilderness of southern Florida. He had somehow gained the confidence of the Seminoles, who ordinarily have no love for the white man. But they admired and trusted Mr. Finneran – so much that they had given him a name and practically adopted him into their tribe. When the Service offered Mr. Finneran this lonely job, he took it gladly, and moved into the little shack that was to serve as home and headquarters. There he lived with a little dog, a few chickens, and a blue indigo snake named Chloe. He had five tree snails on a tree beside the house. He was very proud of them, and when we returned from our glades buggy trip, we brought him a few snails as a gift. He couldn’t have been more pleased if they had been pure gold. I remember how feelingly he spoke to me of the beauty of the Everglades in the early morning, with dew on the grass and thousands of spider webs glistening. He spoke of the birds coming in such numbers they were like dark clouds in the sky. He told of the eerie silver light of the moon, and the red, glowing hordes of alligators in the ponds. His paradise had its flaws, as he acknowledged. He couldn’t have a light in his shack at night because of the terrible Glades mosquito. Sometimes, on rainy nights, fire ants invaded the house and even swarmed into his bed. The Indians said ghosts haunted the place because it was built on an old Indian mound; but Mr. Finneran had heard no ghosts he couldn’t explain. When city dwellers asked him how he stood the loneliness out there, he always asked how they endured sitting around in night clubs. “I wouldn’t trade my life for anything,” he told us.

  From what I have told you, you will know that a large part of my life has been concerned with some of the beauties and mysteries of this earth about us, and with the even greater mysteries of the life that inhabits it. No one can dwell long among such subjects without thinking rather deep thoughts, without asking himself searching and often unanswerable questions, and without achieving a certain philosophy.

  There is one quality that characterizes all of us who deal with the sciences of the earth and its life – we are never bored. We can’t be. There is always something new to be investigated. Every mystery solved brings us to the threshold of a greater one.

  I like to remember the wonderful old Swedish oceanographer, Otto Petterson. He died a few years ago at the age of 93, in full possession of his keen mental powers. His son, also a distinguished oceanographer, tells us in a recent book how intensely his father enjoyed every new experience, every new discovery concerning the world about him. “He was an incurable romantic,” the son wrote, “intensely in love with life and with the mysteries of the Cosmos which, he was firmly convinced, he had been born to unravel.” When, past 90, Otto Petterson realized he had not much longer to enjoy the earthly scene, he said to his son: “What will sustain me in my last moments is an infinite curiosity as to what is to follow.”

  The pleasures, the values of contact with the natural world, are not reserved for the scientists. They are available to anyone who will place himself under the influence of a lonely mountain top – or the sea – or the stillness of a forest; or who will stop to think about so small a thing as the mystery of a growing seed.

  I am not afraid of being thought a sentimentalist when I stand here tonight and tell you that I believe natural beauty has a necessary place in the spiritual development of any individual or any society. I believe that whenever we destroy beauty, or whenever we substitute something man-made and artificial for a natural feature of the earth, w
e have retarded some part of man’s spiritual growth.

  I believe this affinity of the human spirit for the earth and its beauties is deeply and logically rooted. As human beings, we are part of the whole stream of life. We have been human beings for perhaps a million years. But life itself – passes on something of itself to other life – that mysterious entity that moves and is aware of itself and its surroundings, and so is distinguished from rocks or senseless clay – [from which] life arose many hundreds of millions of years ago. Since then it has developed, struggled, adapted itself to its surroundings, evolved an infinite number of forms. But its living protoplasm is built of the same elements as air, water, and rock. To these the mysterious spark of life was added. Our origins are of the earth. And so there is in us a deeply seated response to the natural universe, which is part of our humanity.

  Now why do I introduce such a subject tonight – a serious subject for a night when we are supposed to be having fun? First, because you have asked me to tell you something of myself – and I can’t do that without telling you some of the things I believe in so intensely.

  Also, I mention it because it is not often I have a chance to talk to a thousand women. I believe it is important for women to realize that the world of today threatens to destroy much of that beauty that has immense power to bring us a healing release from tension. Women have a greater intuitive understanding of such things. They want for their children not only physical health but mental and spiritual health as well. I bring these things to your attention tonight because I think your awareness of them will help, whether you are practicing journalists, or teachers, or librarians, or housewives and mothers.

  What are these threats of which I speak? What is this destruction of beauty – this substitution of man-made ugliness – this trend toward a perilously artificial world? Unfortunately, that is a subject that could require a whole conference, extending over many days. So in the few minutes that I have to devote to it, I can only suggest the trend.

  We see it in small ways in our own communities, and in larger ways in the community of the state of the nation. We see the destruction of beauty and the suppression of human individuality in hundreds of suburban real estate developments where the first act is to cut down all the trees and the next is to build an infinitude of little houses, each like its neighbor.

  We see it in distressing form in the nation’s capital, where I live. There in the heart of the city we have a small but beautiful woodland area – Rock Creek Park. It is a place where one can go, away from the noise of traffic and of man-made confusions, for a little interval of refreshing and restoring quiet – where one can hear the soft water sounds of a stream on its way to river and sea, where the wind flows through the trees, and a veery sings in the green twilight. Now they propose to run a six-lane arterial highway through the heart of that narrow woodland valley – destroying forever its true and immeasurable value to the city and the nation.

  Those who place so great a value on a highway apparently do not think the thoughts of an editorial writer for the New York Times who said: “But a little lonesome space, where nature has her own way, where it is quiet enough at night to hear the patter of small paws on leaves and the murmuring of birds, can still be afforded. The gift of tranquillity, wherever found, is beyond price.”

  We see the destructive trend on a national scale in proposals to invade the national parks with commercial schemes such as the building of power dams. The parks were placed in trust for all the people, to preserve for them just such recreational and spiritual values as I have mentioned. Is it the right of this, our generation, in its selfish materialism, to destroy these things because we are blinded by the dollar sign? Beauty – and all the values that derive from beauty – are not measured and evaluated in terms of the dollar.

  Years ago I discovered in the writings of the British naturalist Richard Jefferies a few lines that so impressed themselves upon my mind that I have never forgotten them. May I quote them for you now?

  The exceeding beauty of the earth, in her splendor of life, yields a new thought with every petal. The hours when the mind is absorbed by beauty are the only hours when we really live. All else is illusion, or mere endurance.

  Those lines are, in a way, a statement of the creed I have lived by, for, as perhaps you have seen tonight, a preoccupation with the wonder and beauty of the earth has strongly influenced the course of my life.

  Since The Sea Around Us was published, I have had the privilege of receiving many letters from people who, like myself, have been steadied and reassured by contemplating the long history of the earth and sea, and the deeper meanings of the world of nature. These letters have come from all sorts of people. There have been hairdressers and fishermen and musicians; there have been classical scholars and scientists. So many of them have said, in one phrasing or another: “We have been troubled about the world, and had almost lost faith in man; it helps to think about the long history of the earth, and of how life came to be. And when we think in terms of millions of years, we are not so impatient that our own problems be solved tomorrow.”

  In contemplating “the exceeding beauty of the earth” these people have found calmness and courage. For there is symbolic as well as actual beauty in the migration of birds; in the ebb and flow of the tides; in the folded bud ready for the spring. There is something infinitely healing in these repeated refrains of nature – the assurance that dawn comes after night, and spring after winter.

  Mankind has gone very far into an artificial world of his own creation. He has sought to insulate himself, with steel and concrete, from the realities of earth and water. Perhaps he is intoxicated with his own power, as he goes farther and farther into experiments for the destruction of himself and his world. For this unhappy trend there is no single remedy – no panacea. But I believe that the more clearly we can focus our attention on the wonders and realities of the universe about us, the less taste we shall have for destruction.

  20

  [1956]

  Biological Sciences

  CARSON AGREED TO CONTRIBUTE an essay and select a bibliography on the biological sciences for Good Reading, a reference book sponsored by the National Council of the Teachers of English. Although the Council paid contributors handsomely, Carson found that putting together the bibliography of the best books in the biological sciences required a great deal more work than she had anticipated.

  Her brief introduction to the books she finally selected provides insight into her attitudes toward science in general and to biology in particular at a time when she anticipated beginning her own research for a book on evolutionary biology.

  Carson emphasizes the new science of ecology in her definition of the scope of the biological sciences, reinforcing her view that “nothing lives unto itself.” Lamenting the remoteness of science from the average citizen, Carson characteristically recommended that students explore their subjects first in nature and in the writings of the great naturalists before venturing into the laboratory.

  THE SCOPE OF BIOLOGY can be truly defined only in broad terms as the history of the earth and all its life – the past, the present, and the future. Any definition of lesser scope becomes narrow and academic and fails utterly to convey the majestic sweep of the subject in time and space, embracing all that has made man what he is, and holding a foretaste of what he may yet become. For it has dawned upon us in these recent years of the maturing of our science that neither man nor any other living creature may be studied or comprehended apart from the world in which he lives; that such restricted studies as the classification of plants and animals or descriptions of their anatomy and physiology (upon which the early biologists necessarily focused their attention) are but one small facet of a subject so many-sided, so rich in beauty and fascination, and so filled with significance that no informed reader can neglect it.

  In the truest sense, there is no separate literature of biology or of any science. Knowledge of the facts of science is not the prerogative o
f a small number of men, isolated in their laboratories, but belongs to all men, for the realities of science are the realities of life itself. We cannot understand the problems that concern us in this, our particular moment of time, unless we first understand our environment and the forces that have made us what we are, physically and mentally.

  Biology deals with the living creatures of the living earth. Pleasure in color, form, and movement, awareness of the amazing diversity of life, and the enjoyment of natural beauty are part of man’s heritage as a living creature. Our first conscious acquaintance with the subject should come, if possible, through nature – in fields and forests and on the shore; secondarily and by way of amplification and verification we should then explore its laboratory aspects. Some of the most gifted and imaginative biologists have first approached their subject through the medium of sensory impression and emotional response. The most memorable writings – though they be addressed to the intellect – are rooted in man’s emotional reaction to that life stream of which he is a part. The writing of the great naturalists such as Hudson and Thoreau, most easily sampled in some of the excellent anthologies now available, has a valid place in one’s reading in the field of biology.

  As the frontiers of science expand, there is inevitably an increasing trend toward specialization, in which all the mental faculties of a man or group of men are brought to bear upon a single aspect of some problem. But there is fortunately a counter tendency, which brings different specialists together to work in cooperation. Oceanographic expeditions commonly include biologists, chemists, physicists, geologists, and meteorologists, so diverse are the problems presented by one aspect of the earth’s surface. Atomic physicists, by discovering that radioactive elements in fossils and minerals disintegrate at a rate that may be determined, have provided biologists with a tool that has already revolutionized our concept of the age of the earth and permits a far more accurate approach than ever before to the problem of the evolution of man himself. Chemists and geneticists, by joining forces, seem to be solving the riddle of the gene and the actual means by which it produces hereditary characteristics.