Ocean Book of the Month
Each month in 2008, The Ocean Project will highlight a book focused on our blue planet or environmental sustainability. Books for all age groups will be covered, non-fiction and fiction, prose and poetry. If you have a suggestion, please let us know.
The Edge of the Sea
By Rachel Carson
"The shore is an ancient world, for as long as there has been an earth and sea there has been this place of the meeting of land and water. Yet it is a world that keeps alive the sense of continuing creation and of the relentless drive of life. Each time that I enter it, I gain some new awareness of its beauty and its deeper meanings, sensing that intricate fabric of life by which one creature is linked with another, and each with its surroundings."
Rachel Carson is best known for Silent Spring, one of the most influential books of the 20th century. But while she was profoundly concerned about the environment as a whole, her deepest passion was for the sea, and many readers consider The Edge of the Sea to be one of her finest works.
In this remarkable book, Carson explores rocky shores, sandy beaches, and coral reefs, leading us into unknown worlds to catch the evanescent beauty of a tide pool and tell the story of a grain of sand. With poetry and science she transforms the seemingly simple animal and plant life in the sea into complex and stunningly beautiful creatures deserving of our compassion, understanding, and finally, protection...
From the introduction:
"The edge of the sea is a strange and beautiful place. All through the long history of Earth it has been an area of unrest where waves have broken heavily against the land, where the tides have pressed forward over the continents, receded, and then returned.
Only the most hardy and adaptable can survive in a region so mutable, yet the area between the tide lines is crowded with plants and animals. In this difficult world of the shore, life displays its enormous toughness and vitality by occupying almost every conceivable niche. Visibly, it carpets the intertidal rocks, or half hidden, it descends into fissures and crevices, or hides under boulders, or lurks in the wet gloom of the sea caves. Invisibly, where the causal observer would say there is no life, it lies deep in the sand, in burrows and tubes and passageways. It tunnels into solid rock and bores into peat and clay. It encrusts weeds or drifting spars or the hard, chitinous shell of a lobster. It exists minutely, as the film of bacteria that spreads over a rock surface or a wharf piling, as spheres or protozoa, small as pinpricks, sparkling at the surface of the sea; and as Lilliputian beings swimming through dark pools that lie between the grains of sand."
This is a book to be read for pleasure at any time and in any place, and it is also valuable as a field guide.
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If you are interested in reading this book but also want to be a conscious consumer, please visit your local library and check it out.
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