Scientists of Mystery: Rachel Carson and William Beebe

Encountering the depths of ocean or space can convert the most intellectual of scientists into the most mystical of poets. The wide appeal and influence of Carl Sagan and Neal DeGrasse Tyson is due in part to their ability to turn science into poetry about the universe. We continue our series on Ocean People with two 20th century marine scientists who used their influential popular writing to inspire and move a wide lay audience. They both turned the public tide toward ocean conservation, and they both wrote some fine poetry.

Rachel Carson When marine biologist Rachel Carson published The Sea Around Us in 1951, a book that would go on to win the National Book Award, spend 86 weeks on the NY Times Best Seller list, be translated into 28 languages, reach even more readers in its Readers Digest version, and be serialized in the New Yorker Magazine, she dedicated the book to another marine scientist, her friend and champion, William Beebe. "My absorption in the mystery and meaning of the sea have been stimulated and the writing of this book aided by the friendship and encouragement of William Beebe.”

We are probably more familiar with Carson than Beebe. She followed her influential trilogy of books about the sea in the 1950’s with the even more groundbreaking Silent Spring, 1962, which challenged the myth that postwar science was an unquestioned blessing, calling pesticides “biocides” and describing their wide ranging destruction of whole ecosystems. Attacked ferociously by the chemical industry, Carson and other scientists defended her research and conclusion equally ferociously, and ultimately prevailed, with the outlawing of DDT and the establishment of an Environmental Protection Agency finally independent of the Dept. of Agriculture. Sadly Carson was already battling breast cancer when the book was published and she died two years later, at age 57.

As a woman scientist, who had to leave graduate school to support her widowed mother by taking a job at the US Department of Fisheries, Carson was always on the edge of the scientific establishment, scraping for research money and recognition. But thankfully the Dept. of Fisheries recognized what a good writer she was, and recommended she submit her copy for their marine industry brochures to the Atlantic Monthly as a more fitting and influential medium.

But she might not have gone on to have such wide influence without the support of some likeminded science advocates, like Loren Eisely, E.O. Wilson, and William Beebe. While Eisely and Wilson had academic credibility, Beebe, like Carson, had earned his scientific credentials in the field, and had devoted much of his energy not to academia, but to writing popular articles and advocating for conservation of the remote regions he studied.

Beebe also left school early, quitting Columbia in 1897, in his junior year, to take a job at the brand new New York Zoological Society, better known as the Bronx Zoo. Having done field research already on birds and marine animals, he was intrigued with the new zoological institution, but he also felt, like Carson, a need to support his family financially.

William Beebe and Otis BartonLike Carson, Beebe went on to to have a long and varied career, doing field research on behalf of the Zoo in many different places, especially on birds. He is called a “father of ecology” for his focus on the relationship of organisms to their environment. But he seized the public attention, and that of Rachel Carson, in 1932, when he was the first person to observe deep sea animals in their native habitat by diving over 3000 feet deep in the ocean off Bermuda in a steel capsule called a bathysphere built by his engineering partner Otis Barton.

After these dives New York Times went so far as to compare him with Columbus, Magellan, and Cook. Beebe published a popular account of his bathysphere work in a book titled Half a Mile Down, which earned mixed reviews, particularly among the scientific community, which questioned the value of the dives. But Carson read it, and used its vivid descriptions to write her own books about the sea, before she had ever seen the depth first hand, with the then very new practice of deep sea diving.

Like Carson, Beebe wrote extensively for the popular press. He described what he saw out the window of the bathysphere, deep sea animals, bioluminescence and other mysteries of the deep, first by live radio broadcast on NBC and then in National Geographic.

Beebe was a generation older than Carson, but they became friends and correspondents, and he advocated on her behalf on several occasions to receive publishing contracts and foundation grants. Both favored field research to the increased popularity of laboratory and molecular studies. Neither hesitated to advocate publically for the conservation of the wonders they had studied, eliciting criticism from both the political and scientific establishments.

And both were unabashed about sharing the emotional connection they had with the sea, in Carson’s words about Beebe in her dedication, their shared love for “the mystery and meaning of the sea.”

In a study of the marine science in the 20th century, America’s Ocean Wilderness, A Cultural History of 20th Century Exploration, author Gary Kroll distinguishes between the more utilitarian scientists who saw the ocean as a wide open frontier to exploit for resources and wealth, and the more conservation and mystically minded scientists like Beebe and Carson who experienced there “a seascape of inspiration” and worked to preserve it.

You can read much more about the fascinating lives of Beebe and Carson in their extensive Wikipedia articles and many more articles and books. Let me leave you with just a few of many fine quotations from both scientists that reveal this poetic side of their deep scientific minds.

I would dive deep with either of them any day.

Beebe:

“The marsh, to him who enters it in a receptive mood, holds, besides mosquitoes and stagnation, melody, the mystery of unknown waters, and the sweetness of Nature undisturbed by man.”

“The beauty and genius of a work of art may be reconceived, though its first material expression be destroyed; a vanished harmony may yet again inspire the composer, but when the last individual of a race of living things breathes no more, another heaven and another earth must pass before such a one can be again.”

Carson:

“To stand at the edge of the sea, to sense the ebb and flow of the tides, to feel the breath of a mist moving over a great salt marsh, to watch the flight of shore birds that have swept up and down the surf lines of the continents for untold thousands of years, to see the running of the old eels and the young shad to the sea, is to have knowledge of things that are as nearly eternal as any earthly life can be.”

“The winds, the sea, and the moving tides are what they are. If there is wonder and beauty and majesty in them, science will discover these qualities... If there is poetry in my book about the sea, it is not because I deliberately put it there, but because no one could write truthfully about the sea and leave out the poetry.”

Copyright © 2017 Deborah Streeter