2022.05.17 以完全不同的方式看待世界需要什么

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WHAT IT WOULD TAKE TO SEE THE WORLD COMPLETELY DIFFERENTLY
The marine biologist Rachel Carson saw immense value in helping the public cultivate a sense of wonder.

By Anelise Chen
A sea lion hunting sardines, seen from below in black-and-white
California sea lion hunting sardines in Los Islotes, La Paz, Baja California Sur, Mexico (Nick Polanszky / Alamy)
MAY 17, 2022
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When the marine biologist Rachel Carson was a young girl, she discovered a fossilized shell while hiking around her family’s hillside property in Springdale, Pennsylvania. Those who knew her then would later contend that this relic sparked such intense reverie in her that she instantly felt a tug toward the sea. What was this ancient creature, and what was the world it had known?

Though Carson had never seen the sea herself, she threw herself into its study. She studied biology, then zoology, eventually taking a job as a writer for the U.S. Bureau of Fisheries. All of this was incredibly rare for a young woman in the 1920s and ’30s, but Carson’s trajectory was a demonstration of the expansive potential of curiosity. It also reflected the tireless tutelage of her mother, Maria, who had instilled a love of the wild in her children by regularly taking them on walks to learn about botany and birds. Carson absorbed these lessons and, throughout her life, maintained a deep conviction that wonder had to be at the foundation of any relationship with nature.


In her final months, Carson, age 56, sickened from cancer treatments and in constant pain, still had a couple of remaining projects in mind. One of these was what she called the “wonder book.” By that point, Carson had already written four best-selling books, most famously Silent Spring, which documented the dangers of pesticides, including DDT, and is now widely credited with catalyzing the modern environmental movement. Yet Carson felt she had one more thing to say. The “wonder book”—published posthumously as The Sense of Wonder—was based on a lyrical essay about the importance of cultivating wonder in children. Perhaps because of her early experience, Carson placed great faith in this emotional response that, once found, could serve as “an unfailing antidote against the boredom and disenchantments of later years, the sterile preoccupation with things that are artificial.” Wonder led to a sense of the beautiful, which led to the pursuit of knowledge about the object that triggered the feeling in the first place. Children possessed this “clear-eyed vision” innately, but it had to be kept alive. Adults could awaken this quality in themselves too. With enough attention, she argued, anyone could “feel the rain on [their] face and think of its long journey, its many transmutations, from sea to air to earth.”


The Sea Trilogy: Under the Sea-Wind / The Sea Around Us / The Edge of the SeaRACHEL CARSON,LIBRARY OF AMERICA
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The Sense of WonderRACHEL CARSON,HARPER PERENNIAL
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Read: Swimming in the wild will change you

Why did Carson feel so strongly the need to proselytize the wonders of wonder? Perhaps she sensed that, without it, an emotional connection with nature would be impossible; without it, the environmental movement had no hope. “The more clearly we can focus our attention on the wonders and realities of the universe,” she once said, “the less taste we shall have for the destruction of our race.” Today, we remember Carson for her crusading spirit and moral clarity; we cite Silent Spring as an example of a political book that spurred public outrage and prodded the government toward action. However, we far less frequently remember Carson for this other thing she spent her whole life doing: helping the public cultivate a sense of awe about nature. To see this facet of her sensibility most clearly, we need to return to her first three books—The Sea Trilogy.

It was april 1936. Dust storms thundered across the plains of Texas and Oklahoma, Nazi Germany had reoccupied the Rhineland a month earlier, and the Spanish Civil War would soon erupt. Meanwhile, in Washington, D.C., Carson had just turned in a draft of her latest essay, titled “The World of Waters.” Her assignment at the U.S. Bureau of Fisheries had been to write an introduction for a government brochure on fish. The year before, she had helped write a radio series informally dubbed “seven-minute fish tales,” a deceptively difficult job that had confounded other employees who either knew hard science or knew how to write but couldn’t merge the two. Rachel Carson, it turned out, could. As her supervisor, Elmer Higgins, read the draft, Carson sat quietly in his cramped office and nervously awaited his verdict. “I don’t think it will do,” she later recalled him saying when he looked up again, with a “twinkle in his eye.” These pages were not suitable for a government brochure on fish, he continued. No. This was literature. He passed the pages back to her and said, “Better try again. But send this one to The Atlantic.”


A version of that essay was published in this magazine a year later, titled “Undersea.” The editor who accepted Carson’s essay praised it for illuminating science “in such a way as to fire the imagination of the layman.” Lively, lyrical, and exactingly researched, the essay showcased what would soon be recognized as her signature style to a national audience. Here was her abiding emphasis on ecology and life cycles—and her commitment to making the reader feel something. She strove to educate, and to astonish. She deftly manipulated sound, rhythm, and atmosphere. Life on the ocean floor was described as in a moody noir, bathed in perpetual “bluish twilight” where “swarms of diminutive fish twinkle through the dusk like a silver rain of meteors, and eels lie in wait among the rocks.” The mid-ocean lulled with its “lilt of the long, slow swells,” while at the shore, the aptly accented “foam and surge of the tide” beat relentlessly upon its sturdy little inhabitants. Determined to avoid what she later called the “human bias” of popular science writing, Carson sought to portray the world of waters solely from a creaturely perspective, urging readers to “shed [their] human perceptions.”

white tip sharks feeding around a reef in black and white
Stacks of whitetip sharks at Roca Partida, Revillagigedo Islands, Baja California Sur, Mexico (Nick Polanszky / Alamy)
By Carson’s own estimation, from the publication of “Undersea,” “everything else followed.” Her career as a poet of the sea unfurled. Carson went on to write three best-selling books about the sea: Under the Sea-Wind (1941), adapted from “Undersea”; The Sea Around Us (1951); and The Edge of the Sea (1955). These three books make up her Sea Trilogy, recently reissued by Library of America. Under the Sea-Wind was, Carson thought, her “first real act of literary creation.” It stands out in her body of work for its genre-breaking creative daring—reading more like an adventure novel than a book of science. Written from a close-third-person omniscient point of view, interweaving the perspectives of different (named) animal characters, it animates the life stories of Rynchops the skimmer, the sanderling couple Blackfoot and Silverbar, and Anguilla the eel. We see them struggling to survive, making a life, battling harsh weather, feeding, fleeing, and embarking upon their final journeys to mate and then die. Today we are familiar with the high-definition, IMAX version of what Carson conjured through language—the swoops of riveting pursuit and slow-motion escapes of the nature documentary. That she honed her storytelling chops while writing the public-service equivalent of bingeable TV is unsurprising. About 80 years later, Sea-Wind still reads like a scintillating adventure tale. Reviews from scientists and nonscientists alike praised it for its “lyrical beauty” and “faultless science,” “so skillfully written as to read like fiction.”

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Carson wanted not just to entertain but also to impart an abiding sense of interconnectedness. In a section of Sea-Wind about the reawakening of life on spring seas (yes, seas have seasons too, I learned), Carson pulls us in to witness the great seasonal mackerel spawn, a “sprawling river of life, the sea’s counterpart of the river of stars that flows through the sky at the Milky Way.” There, we are introduced to one mackerel, whom Carson cheekily names “Scomber.” (Scomber is a genus of fish, known as one of the “true mackerels.”) We see Scomber’s conception, his development from an egg floating passively on the sea, his formation of a backbone. Alone, he must evade the hungry mouths of anchovies who are themselves hunted by larger bluefish. Crossing the murky depths, he’s soon caught in the grasp of a “shimmering oval globe”—the comb jelly Pleurobrachia. But before he’s sucked into its pulsing mouth—nail-biting tension here!—the comb jelly and Scomber are both unexpectedly trapped in the mouth of a sea trout, who fortunately spits them both out after a few experimental bites.

The sequence is thrilling, while showing in immersive detail the workings of one food chain among innumerable others in the ocean. Though there is little sentimentality here about the death of any particular creature—everything, whether plankton or fish or mollusk, is always eating or being eaten—there is a sense of horror at human plunder. The sheer scale of what humans took for themselves is what made them monstrous. Carson opts to portray the ravage of resources indirectly, through mood and insinuation. We zoom in—something is amiss. Coming over the plateau, Scomber and his companions see some large haddock caught, “turning and twisting slowly on the hooks that they had swallowed.” Narrowly evading this gruesome scene, the mackerel then confront another threat looming from below: a trawl net, a “cavernous bag” scooping up thousands of pounds of life from the ocean floor.

Read: Netflix’s Our Planet says what other nature series have omitted

After spending all of Scomber’s life with him, how could the reader not feel for him, root for him? Narrating from the point of view of animal protagonists is a classic technique that builds empathy bridges, but in this case it’s done without the purely commercial manipulations of, say, Disney movies. Instead, a different political agenda is at work. The violence inherent in extractive capitalism and the particular logic that allows for some lives to be rendered utterly dispensable is intimated rather than stated. Can Scomber persist? At the end of the mackerel chapter, Carson floats away from the besieged mackerel’s mind and into the mind of a young fisherman on the deck of a boat, who’s been at sea for only two years:

He sometimes thought about fish as he looked at them on deck or being iced down in the hold. What had the eyes of the mackerel seen? Things he’d never see; places he’d never go. He seldom put it into words, but it seemed to him incongruous that a creature that had made a go of life in the sea, that had run the gauntlet of all the relentless enemies that he knew roved through that dimness his eyes could not penetrate, should at last come to death on the deck of a mackerel seiner, slimy with fish gurry and slippery with scales.

What had the eyes of the mackerel seen? How was it that this mackerel, who had “run the gauntlet” of the sea, should end life in this ignoble way? The young fisherman is confronting these ecological questions firsthand, asking the questions that Carson would like us to ask. And now that we’ve experienced what the mackerel saw and the fisherman wondered—what follows?

Rays swimming as a group in black water
Fever of Mobula rays in Espiritu Santo, La Paz, Baja California Sur, Mexico (Nick Polanszky / Alamy)
If carson’s sea books can serve a “utilitarian” purpose today, guesses Sandra Steingraber, an environmental activist and the editor of the new Sea Trilogy edition, they mark a “disappearing natural baseline” that describes “how the all-creating ocean functioned, how its creatures lived and interacted.” As I read, I noted, sadly, all the past-tense verbs in that sentence. Is it already too late to know the sea as Carson once did? In her introduction, Steingraber goes on to list the currently unfolding catastrophes that Carson never lived to see: “industrial overfishing, or news of the potential collapse of the Gulf Stream, or massive floating garbage patches, or icebergs the size of states breaking off Antarctica, or micro-plastics replacing plankton in the water column, or plans for deep-sea mining.” To that list one might add ocean acidification, hypoxic dead zones, sonar testing, and coral die-off. Steingraber strains for some silver lining: “But her words fortify us for battles” and—she sums things up waveringly—“inspire curiosity and care about what we are in the process of losing.”


Is wonder still possible, given our climate crisis? Wonder implies some degree of leisure and time; it requires slow, sustained, and contemplative attention—a luxury that, perhaps, we can no longer afford. Even Carson, when she wrote the new preface for the revised 1961 edition of The Sea Around Us, couldn’t help but inject an urgent warning about the practice of dumping nuclear waste into the ocean. She called the previous assurance that the sea was so large as to be inviolate a “naive” belief. Today, as dire emergencies unfold, rationalizing time spent merely appreciating the natural world seems even more difficult. During the COP26 climate conference, protesters held up signs spelling doom and chanted: “If not now, when? When?” Greta Thunberg summarily declared the conference a failure, dismissing it as a meaningless PR event for “beautiful speeches.”

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The climate crisis requires urgency on a global scale: Countries need to act, policies need to be set in motion. But slowness is needed as well. As the writer Naomi Klein points out in On Fire: The (Burning) Case for a Green New Deal, our “culture of the perpetual present” is not equipped to deal with the generations-long nature of the crisis. Market forces compel us to speed up precisely when we need to take a beat; to insulate ourselves from the physical environment precisely when we need to develop a more intimate connection. Modern life guarantees the atrophy of important “observational tools,” Klein writes; rather than stopping someplace to get to know its rhythms and cycles, we sever and uproot ourselves by living through screens and portals. All of this helps maintain the harmful illusion that if one environment gets destroyed, there will always be some other “away” to escape into.

a cormorant hunting seen in black and white
Cormorant hunting sardines in Los Islotes, La Paz, Baja California Sur, Mexico (Nick Polanszky / Alamy)
In our day-to-day lives, pure enjoyment of nature can seem somehow suspect or unproductive, and the justification of such time spent is often couched in utilitarian or economic terms. Walks are for clearing heads; hikes are good exercise. Carson anticipated this line of thinking. In The Sense of Wonder, she asks rhetorically, “What is the value of preserving and strengthening this sense of awe and wonder … ? Is [it] just a pleasant way to pass the golden hours of childhood, or is there something deeper?” Though we tend to think of the American mid-century as a time of prosperity and advancement—perhaps they had time to wonder, but we don’t—it was, in fact, equally plagued with existential emergencies: the Cold War, McCarthyism, segregation and intractable racism. Stopping to wonder seemed frivolous back then too. Carson’s rebuttal, rousing and powerful, argues that wonder provides no less than joy, hope, and inner strength in the face of despair and annihilation:

Those who dwell … among the beauties and mysteries of the earth are never alone or weary of life. Whatever the vexations or concerns of their personal lives, their thoughts can find paths that lead to inner contentment and to renewed excitement in living. Those who contemplate the beauty of the earth find reserves of strength that will endure as long as life lasts. There is symbolic as well as actual beauty in the migration of the birds, the ebb and flow of the tides, the folded bud ready for the spring. There is something infinitely healing in the repeated refrains of nature—the assurance that dawn comes after night, and spring after the winter.

Trusting in wonder’s resonant effects is something akin to faith. Fear can be motivating, but so can love. Taking a cue from Carson, I’ve been trying to take more walks with open eyes and an open heart, unpracticed as I may be. I treat myself like a child and go around with a pair of binoculars. After reading that the spring migration of birds is again in full swing, one night during a full-ish moon, I took my binoculars and sat out on the stoop. One of the fun activities that Carson recommends is to point the lens to the moon to see if you can catch the silhouettes of migrating birds as they pass across its shining face. I also listened hard to detect the “wisps of sound,” the “sharp chirps, sibilant lisps, and call notes” of eager flocks. Instead, I heard trucks clattering down I-95 and my neighbor wheeling his garbage out. After about half an hour, I brushed off my pants and headed back inside. It hadn’t been a spectacular experience by any means, but, maybe because I had strained so long to hear them and see them, I dreamed of the birds that night. In my mind’s eye, an endless, exuberant procession of birds passed high above the sleeping city, dipping in and out of the moonlit clouds, calling to one another from darkness to darkness. They were sure of their destination, unwavering.

The Sea Trilogy: Under the Sea-Wind / The Sea Around Us / The Edge of the SeaRACHEL CARSON, LIBRARY OF AMERICA
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The Sense of WonderRACHEL CARSON, HARPER PERENNIAL
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Anelise Chen is writing a book about mollusks in the popular imagination. She teaches writing at Columbia University.



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以完全不同的方式看待世界需要什么
海洋生物学家雷切尔-卡森看到了帮助公众培养好奇心的巨大价值。

作者：Anelise Chen
一头海狮在捕食沙丁鱼，从下往上看是黑白的。
加州海狮在墨西哥南下加利福尼亚州拉巴斯的Los Islotes捕猎沙丁鱼（Nick Polanszky / Alamy）。
2022年5月17日
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当海洋生物学家雷切尔-卡森还是个小女孩的时候，她在宾夕法尼亚州斯普林代尔的家庭山坡上徒步旅行时发现了一块贝壳化石。当时认识她的人后来认为，这个遗物引发了她强烈的遐想，使她立即感到了对海洋的牵挂。这个古老的生物是什么，它所知道的世界是什么？

尽管卡森自己从未见过大海，但她还是投入到对大海的研究中。她学习生物学，然后是动物学，最后在美国渔业局担任作家。所有这些对于20世纪20年代和30年代的年轻女性来说是非常罕见的，但卡森的轨迹显示了好奇心的巨大潜力。这也反映了她的母亲玛丽亚孜孜不倦的教导，她通过定期带孩子们散步来学习植物学和鸟类知识，向孩子们灌输了对野生环境的热爱。卡森吸收了这些课程，并在她的一生中保持着一种深刻的信念，即任何与自然的关系都必须以好奇为基础。


在她最后的几个月里，56岁的卡森因癌症治疗而病倒了，一直处于痛苦之中，但她仍然有几个剩余的项目在考虑之中。其中之一就是她所说的 "奇迹之书"。到那时，卡森已经写了四本畅销书，其中最著名的是《寂静的春天》，它记录了包括DDT在内的杀虫剂的危害，现在被广泛认为是对现代环保运动的催化。然而，卡森认为她还有一件事要讲。这本 "奇迹之书"--以《奇迹之感》的名义出版--是基于一篇关于培养儿童奇迹的重要性的抒情性文章。也许是因为她早年的经历，卡森对这种情感反应抱有极大的信心，一旦发现，它可以作为 "一种不折不扣的解毒剂，防止晚年的无聊和失意，以及对人造事物的无谓关注。" 惊奇导致了对美丽的感觉，这导致了对首先引发这种感觉的物体的知识的追求。儿童天生就拥有这种 "清晰的视觉"，但它必须被保持活力。成人也可以唤醒自己的这种品质。她认为，只要有足够的注意力，任何人都可以 "感受到脸上的雨水，并想到它的漫长旅程，它的许多转换，从海洋到空气再到地球。"


海洋三部曲。海风之下》/《我们身边的海》/《海的边缘》RACHEL CARSON，美国图书馆。
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奇妙的感觉RACHEL CARSON,HARPER PERENNIAL
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阅读：在野外游泳会改变你

为什么卡森如此强烈地感到有必要向人们宣传奇迹的奥妙？也许她感觉到，没有它，就不可能与大自然建立情感联系；没有它，环保运动就没有希望。她曾说："我们越是能把注意力集中在宇宙的奇迹和现实上，""我们就越不喜欢毁灭我们的种族"。今天，我们记住了卡森的十字军精神和道德上的清醒；我们把《寂静的春天》作为一本政治书的例子，它激起了公众的愤怒并促使政府采取行动。然而，我们却很少记住卡森的另一件事：帮助公众培养对自然的敬畏感，她花了一生的时间。为了最清楚地了解她的这一感受，我们需要回到她的前三本书--《海洋三部曲》。

那是1936年4月。沙尘暴在德克萨斯州和俄克拉荷马州的平原上打着雷，纳粹德国在一个月前重新占领了莱茵兰，西班牙内战很快就会爆发了。与此同时，在华盛顿特区，卡森刚刚交出了她最新论文的草稿，题目是 "水的世界"。她在美国渔业局的任务是为一本关于鱼类的政府手册写一篇介绍。前一年，她帮助编写了一个被非正式地称为 "七分钟鱼类故事 "的广播系列节目，这是一项具有欺骗性的困难工作，使其他员工感到困惑，他们要么知道硬科学，要么知道如何写作，但无法将这两者融合起来。事实证明，瑞秋-卡森可以。当她的上司埃尔默-希金斯阅读草案时，卡森安静地坐在他狭窄的办公室里，紧张地等待着他的裁决。她后来回忆说，当他再次抬起头来时，他说："我认为这不行。"他的 "眼睛里闪烁着光芒"。他继续说，这些页面不适合作为政府的鱼类宣传册。不，这是文学作品。他把书页递回给她，说："最好再试一次。但要把这篇寄给《大西洋》。"


一年后，这篇文章的一个版本在这本杂志上发表，标题是 "海底"。接受卡森的文章的编辑称赞它 "以这样一种方式阐明了科学，从而激发了普通人的想象力"。这篇文章生动、抒情、研究准确，向全国读者展示了她很快就会被公认为是她的标志性风格。这是她对生态学和生命周期的一贯强调，也是她对让读者有所感悟的承诺。她努力教育，并使人惊奇。她巧妙地处理了声音、节奏和气氛。海底的生活被描述成喜怒无常的黑夜，沐浴在永久的 "蓝色黄昏 "中，"成群的小鱼在黄昏中闪烁，像一场银色的流星雨，鳗鱼躺在岩石中等待。" 大洋中的 "长长的、缓慢的海浪 "让人心旷神怡，而在岸边，恰如其分的 "潮水的泡沫和涌动 "无情地冲击着坚固的小居民。卡森决心避免她后来所说的科普写作中的 "人类偏见"，她试图完全从生物的角度来描绘水域的世界，敦促读者 "摆脱[他们的]人类观念"。

白鳍鲨在礁石周围进食的黑白照片
墨西哥南下加利福尼亚州雷维拉吉多群岛Roca Partida的成堆白鳍鲨 (Nick Polanszky / Alamy)
根据卡森自己的估计，从《海底》的出版开始，"其他一切都随之而来"。她作为海洋诗人的职业生涯就此展开。卡森后来又写了三本关于海洋的畅销书。海风之下》（1941年），改编自《海底》；《我们周围的海》（1951年）；以及《海的边缘》（1955年）。这三本书组成了她的海洋三部曲，最近由美国图书馆重新发行。卡森认为，《海风之下》是她 "第一次真正的文学创作行为"。在她的作品中，这本书因其突破性的创意而脱颖而出--读起来更像是一本冒险小说，而不是一本科学书。该书以近距离的第三人称全知视角写作，交织了不同（有名字的）动物角色的视角，生动地讲述了撇嘴鱼Rynchops、沙丁鱼夫妇Blackfoot和Silverbar以及鳗鱼Anguilla的生活故事。我们看到他们挣扎着生存，创造生活，与恶劣的天气作斗争，觅食，逃亡，并开始了他们最后的旅程，进行交配，然后死亡。今天，我们熟悉的是卡森通过语言想象出来的高清晰度、IMAX版本--自然纪录片中引人入胜的追逐和慢动作的逃亡。她在撰写相当于公共服务的可播放电视时磨练了她讲故事的能力，这并不奇怪。大约80年后，《海风》仍然像一个令人心动的冒险故事。科学家和非科学家的评论都赞扬了它的 "抒情之美 "和 "无懈可击的科学"，"写得如此巧妙，就像小说一样"。

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全明星珠宝窃贼团的崛起与衰落
GEOFF MANAUGH
卡森不仅想要娱乐，而且还想传授一种持久的相互联系的感觉。在《海风》中关于春季海洋生命苏醒的部分（是的，海洋也有季节，我知道），卡森把我们拉去见证伟大的季节性鲭鱼产卵，这是一条 "蔓延的生命之河，海洋的对应物是流经银河系天空的星星之河。" 在那里，我们被介绍给一条鲭鱼，卡森厚颜无耻地把它命名为 "Scomber"。(Scomber是鱼的一个属，被称为 "真正的鲭鱼 "之一。)我们看到Scomber的构思，他从被动地漂浮在海面上的蛋发展而来，他形成了骨架。它必须独自躲避饥饿的凤尾鱼的嘴，而凤尾鱼本身又被更大的蓝鱼追捕。穿过阴暗的深海，他很快就被一个 "闪亮的椭圆形球体"--梳状果冻Pleurobrachia--抓住了。但在他被吸进它的脉动嘴里之前--这里有咬指甲的紧张感！--梳状水母和Scomber都意外地被困在一条海鳟鱼的嘴里，幸运的是，海鳟鱼在实验性地咬了几口之后把它们都吐了出来。

这一幕惊心动魄，同时以身临其境的细节展示了海洋中无数食物链的运作。虽然这里对任何特定生物的死亡都没有什么感伤--所有的东西，无论是浮游生物、鱼类还是软体动物，都在吃或被吃--但对人类的掠夺有一种恐怖感。人类为自己掠夺的东西的规模之大，使他们成为怪物。卡森选择通过情绪和暗示间接地描绘资源的蹂躏。我们把镜头拉近--有些事情是不对劲的。走过高原，斯考伯和他的同伴们看到一些被抓住的大黑鱼，"在它们吞下的鱼钩上慢慢转动和扭曲"。勉强躲过这可怕的一幕后，鲭鱼们又面临着从下面隐约而来的另一个威胁：一个拖网，一个从海底捞起数千磅生命的 "空洞的袋子"。

阅读。Netflix的《我们的星球》讲述了其他自然系列节目所遗漏的内容。

在与Scomber一起度过了所有的生活之后，读者怎么能不为他感到高兴，为他扎根？从动物主人公的角度进行叙述是一种经典的技巧，可以建立起共鸣的桥梁，但在这种情况下，它没有像迪斯尼电影那样进行纯粹的商业操作。相反，一个不同的政治议程正在发挥作用。采掘性资本主义的内在暴力和允许一些生命被完全抛弃的特殊逻辑被暗示而不是陈述。Scomber能坚持下去吗？在鲭鱼一章的结尾，卡森从被围困的鲭鱼的头脑中飘了出来，进入了一个年轻渔民在船甲板上的头脑，他在海上只呆了两年。

他有时在甲板上看着鱼，或者在船舱里看着被冰封的鱼，就会想到这些鱼。鲭鱼的眼睛看到了什么？他从未见过的东西；他从未去过的地方。他很少用言语表达，但对他来说，一个在海里闯荡的生物，一个经历了所有无情的敌人的考验的生物，他知道这些敌人在他的眼睛无法穿透的黑暗中游荡，最后却死在了青花鱼捕鱼船的甲板上，身上粘满了鱼胶和滑腻的鳞片。

鲭鱼的眼睛看到了什么？这条在大海中 "跑了一圈 "的鲭鱼怎么会以这种无耻的方式结束生命？这位年轻的渔夫正亲身面对这些生态问题，提出了卡森希望我们提出的问题。现在我们已经经历了青花鱼所看到的和渔夫所想的--接下来是什么？

鳐鱼在黑水中集体游泳
墨西哥南下加利福尼亚州拉巴斯市圣埃斯皮里图的莫布拉鳐鱼热（Nick Polanszky / Alamy)
如果卡森的海洋书籍在今天还能起到 "功利 "的作用，环保活动家、新版《海洋三部曲》的编辑桑德拉-斯泰格拉伯猜测，它们标志着一条 "正在消失的自然底线"，描述了 "所有创造的海洋如何运作，其生物如何生活和互动。" 当我阅读时，我悲哀地注意到，这句话中所有的过去式动词。要像卡森那样了解海洋，是不是已经太晚了？在她的介绍中，Steingraber继续列举了目前正在发生的灾难，而卡森从未活着看到这些灾难。"工业化的过度捕捞，或海湾流可能崩溃的消息，或大量的漂浮垃圾，或在南极洲外打破的像国家一样大的冰山，或在水体中取代浮游生物的微型塑料，或深海采矿的计划。在这个清单上，人们可以加上海洋酸化、缺氧死区、声纳测试和珊瑚死亡。Steingraber竭力寻找一些银色的机会。"但她的文字使我们更有战斗力"，而且--她对事情的总结是摇摆不定的--"激发了我们对正在失去的东西的好奇心和关心"。


鉴于我们的气候危机，惊奇还可能吗？奇迹意味着某种程度的闲暇和时间；它需要缓慢、持续和沉思的关注--也许，我们再也负担不起这种奢侈。即使是卡森，当她为1961年修订版的《我们周围的海洋》写新的序言时，也忍不住对向海洋倾倒核废料的做法提出了紧急警告。她称之前的保证，即大海大到不可侵犯是一种 "天真的 "信念。今天，随着可怕的紧急情况的发生，合理安排仅仅欣赏自然世界的时间似乎更加困难。在COP26气候大会期间，抗议者举着写着厄运的牌子，并高呼。"如果不是现在，什么时候？什么时候？" 格雷塔-图恩伯格总结性地宣布会议失败，将其视为一个毫无意义的 "美丽演讲 "的公关活动。

阅读。家庭盆栽繁荣的黑暗面

气候危机需要在全球范围内的紧迫性。各国需要采取行动，政策需要被启动。但也需要缓慢的行动。正如作家纳奥米-克莱因在《着火了：绿色新政的（燃烧）案例》中指出的那样，我们的 "永恒的当下文化 "并不具备处理危机的世代性。市场力量迫使我们在需要休息的时候加快脚步；在需要建立更亲密的联系的时候将自己与物理环境隔离。现代生活保证了重要的 "观察工具 "的萎缩，克莱因写道；我们不是停在某个地方去了解它的节奏和周期，而是通过屏幕和门户来切断和拔除自己。所有这些都有助于维持一种有害的幻觉，即如果一个环境被破坏了，总会有其他的 "地方 "可以逃离。

鸬鹚捕食的黑白画面
鸬鹚在墨西哥南下加利福尼亚州拉巴斯的洛斯岛捕食沙丁鱼（Nick Polanszky / Alamy）。
在我们的日常生活中，纯粹的自然享受似乎有些可疑或无益，而且这种时间花费的理由往往是以功利或经济术语来表达的。散步是为了让人头脑清醒；远足是很好的运动。卡森预见到了这种思维方式。在《神奇的感觉》中，她反问道："保护和加强这种敬畏和神奇的感觉的价值是什么......？它是否只是一种打发童年黄金时光的愉快方式，还是有更深层次的东西？虽然我们倾向于认为美国本世纪中叶是一个繁荣和进步的时代--也许他们有时间去想，但我们没有--但事实上，它同样被生存的紧急情况所困扰：冷战、麦卡锡主义、种族隔离和难以解决的种族主义。停下来想一想，在当时似乎也是轻率的。卡森的反驳激昂而有力，他认为在面对绝望和毁灭时，奇迹提供了不亚于欢乐、希望和内在力量。

那些居住在......地球的美丽和神秘中的人，永远不会孤独，也不会对生活感到厌倦。无论他们的个人生活有什么烦恼或忧虑，他们的思想都能找到通向内心满足和重新激发生活热情的道路。思考地球之美的人找到了力量的储备，只要生命还在，就会持续下去。鸟儿的迁徙、潮汐的起伏、为春天准备好的折叠花苞，这些都是象征性的，也是实际的美。在自然界的反复吟唱中，有一种无限的治愈力--保证黎明在夜晚之后到来，春天在冬天之后到来。

相信奇迹的共鸣效应是类似于信仰的东西。恐惧可以是动力，但爱也可以。从卡森那里得到启发，我一直在努力睁大眼睛，敞开心扉，多走走，尽管我可能没有实践过。我把自己当做一个孩子，带着一副望远镜到处走。在读到鸟类的春季迁徙又在如火如荼地进行后，在一个月圆之夜，我带着望远镜，坐在门廊上。卡森推荐的一项有趣的活动是将镜头对准月亮，看看你是否能捕捉到迁徙的鸟儿穿过月亮光亮面孔时的剪影。我还努力听着，以发现 "一缕缕的声音"，"尖锐的鸣叫声、咝咝的叫声，以及渴望的鸟群的叫声"。相反，我听到卡车在I-95公路上辚辚作响，我的邻居把他的垃圾推了出来。大约半小时后，我刷掉裤子，回到屋里。这绝不是一次壮观的经历，但是，也许是因为我努力了这么久才听到和看到它们，那天晚上我梦到了这些鸟。在我的脑海中，一支无尽的、兴高采烈的鸟儿队伍从沉睡的城市上空经过，在月光下的云层中来回穿梭，在黑暗中相互呼唤。它们确信自己的目的地，坚定不移。

海洋三部曲。海风之下》/《我们身边的海》/《海的边缘》拉切尔-卡森，美国图书馆。
购买书籍
奇妙的感觉拉切尔-卡森，哈珀年刊。
购买书籍
Anelise Chen正在写一本关于大众想象中的软体动物的书。她在哥伦比亚大学教授写作。