The Book of Eels, Patrik Svensson [bill gates best books .TXT] 📗

unadulterated objectivity, the truth that reveals itself only under the microscope. It attempts to describe the world as it is, not as it seems. An eel is not a person and cannot, therefore, be likened to one. Anyone with an objective, empiricist approach to knowledge could not bring himself to speak of animals that way. To experience the world as human belongs to us alone.

But when Rachel Carson wrote about the eel, that was, nevertheless, what she did. She anthropomorphized it. She described the eel as a sentient creature with feelings, an animal with memory and reason, which could be tormented by the tribulations it was destined for or could enjoy the bright side of life. And she had her reasons for doing so. When the history of science is one day summed up, Rachel Carson will stand out as one of the people who contributed most to our understanding of not only the eel but also the vast and complex ecosystem to which it inevitably belongs.

Rachel Carson was one of the twentieth century’s most prominent and influential marine biologists. She was first and foremost an expert in the ocean and its inhabitants; she wrote several groundbreaking books about marine life and eventually also became a pioneer of and icon to the burgeoning environmental movement. She was an extraordinary person in many ways.

Carson was born in May 1907 and grew up on a small farm in Springdale, Pennsylvania, a stone’s throw from the mighty Allegheny River, which loops around the town. It was here, during her very first years, that she developed her lifelong interest in animals and nature. As a young child, she learned to love the forests and wetlands, the birds and the fish. The river in particular left her spellbound, as did everything in it, all the life that the water from the branched torrents brought with it on its long journey to the sea.

That being said, her professional path was by no means predetermined. Her father was a traveling salesman and her mother a housewife. The family was poor and an academic career hardly a given. But her mother, who had given up her career as a teacher when she got married, encouraged her daughter’s interest in nature. She took Rachel on long walks to study plants, insects, and birds. She trained her in the art of observation and taught her how to notice details and also instilled in her a deep and loving respect for the diversity of life. As soon as Rachel Carson learned how to read and write, she started making little books, illustrated pamphlets with fact-filled stories about mice, frogs, owls, and fish. It’s said she was a lonely child, with few, if any, close friends, but she never felt alone or out of place in nature. That was the world she got to know better than any other.

Eventually, she did end up going to university, at the age of eighteen, after graduating at the top of her class and after her mother sold the family china to pay her tuition. At first, she studied history, sociology, English, and French, but the central interest of her life is obvious from her very first university essay: “I love all the beautiful things of nature and the wild creatures are my friends.” Two years later, when she was twenty, she had a life-changing realization. She herself described it as an epiphany. One day she suddenly realized she was supposed to dedicate her life to the ocean. The ocean was to be the focus of all her curiosity and academic talent. “I realized,” she wrote later, “that my own path led to the sea—which until then I had not seen—and that my own destiny was somehow linked with the sea.”

What drew Rachel Carson to the sea? The choice may seem arbitrary. She had grown up away from the coast and had never laid eyes on the ocean, never dipped her toes into its water or listened to its waves crashing against the shore. And yet it seemed inevitable. It was as though she were following a scent down a mighty river, against the current, all the way to its origin, to the sea, which is the origin of everything. That was the core of her epiphany. We all came from the sea once, and therefore anyone wishing to understand life on this planet has to first understand the sea. Much later, in her 1951 book, entitled The Sea around Us, she explained this insight in a way that encapsulates what sets her apart from most marine biologists, a way that is at once scientific and poetic:

When they went ashore the animals that took up a land life carried with them a part of the sea in their bodies, a heritage which they passed on to their children and which even today links each land animal with its origin in the ancient sea. Fish, amphibian, and reptile, warm-blooded bird and mammal—each of us carries in our veins a salty stream in which the elements sodium, potassium, and calcium are combined in almost the same proportions as in sea water. This is our inheritance from the day, untold millions of years ago, when a remote ancestor having progressed from the one-celled to the many-celled stage, first developed a circulatory system in which the fluid was merely the water of the sea.

Thus we are all created from water, we all come from our own mysterious Sargasso Seas. “And as life itself began in the sea, so each of us begins his identical life in a miniature ocean within his mother’s womb.”

IN THE AUTUMN OF 1932, RACHEL CARSON HAD JUST BEGUN HER graduate studies in marine biology and kept in a corner of her laboratory a big tank of eels. She wanted to study how eels react to changes in salinity. She wanted to understand how the animal coped with the radical changes it experienced during its life cycle, how it submitted to its destiny, its long, hopeless migration