Lost Woods (12 page)

14

[1953]

Mr. Day’s Dismissal

ALBERT M. DAY
was named director of the Fish and Wildlife Service in 1946, and under his direction the Service became the premier advocate for the conservation of the wildlife resources of the nation.

When the Republicans won the White House in 1952, they began to institute policies more beneficial to big business than to conservation. Shortly after Oregon businessman Douglas McKay was appointed Secretary of the Interior, Albert Day and other top professional staff of the department were dismissed and replaced by nonprofessional political appointees. Deeply disturbed by this trend and what it portended for the future of the environment, Carson took pen to paper to protest.

Her letter to the editor of the
Washington Post
displays Carson’s activist instincts, and her skill in raising the standard of political debate. Her letter was picked up by the Associated Press wire service, syndicated across the country, and later reprinted in
Reader’s Digest.

THE DISMISSAL OF MR. ALBERT M. DAY
as director of the Fish and Wildlife Service is the most recent of a series of events that should be deeply disturbing to every thoughtful citizen. The ominous pattern that is clearly being revealed is the elimination from the Government of career men of long experience and high professional competence and their replacement by political appointees. The firing of Mr. Marion Clawson, director of the Bureau of Land Management, is another example. There are widespread rumors that the head of the Park Service, who, like Mr. Day, has spent his entire professional life in the organization he heads, will also be replaced. These actions strongly suggest that the way is being cleared for a raid upon our natural resources that is without parallel within the present century.

The real wealth of the Nation lies in the resources of the earth – soil, water, forests, minerals, and wildlife. To utilize them for present needs while insuring their preservation for future generations requires a delicately balanced and continuing program, based on the most extensive research. Their administration is not properly, and cannot be, a matter of politics.

By long tradition, the agencies responsible for these resources have been directed by men of professional stature and experience, who have understood, respected, and been guided by the findings of their scientists. Mr. Day’s career in wildlife conservation began 35 years ago, when, as a young biologist, he was appointed to the staff of the former Biological Survey, which later became part of the Fish and Wildlife Service. During the intervening years he rose through the ranks, occupying successively higher positions until he was appointed director in 1946. He achieved a reputation as an able and fair-minded administrator, with courage to stand firm against the minority groups who demanded that he relax wildlife conservation measures so that they might raid these public resources. Secretary McKay, whose own grasp of conservation problems is yet to be demonstrated, has now decreed that the Nation is to be deprived of these services.

These actions within the Interior Department fall into place beside the proposed giveaway of our offshore oil reserves and the threatened invasion of national parks, forests and other public lands.

For many years public-spirited citizens throughout the country have been working for the conservation of the natural resources, realizing their vital importance to the Nation. Apparently their hard-won progress is to be wiped out, as a politically minded Administration returns us to the dark ages of unrestrained exploitation and destruction.

It is one of the ironies of our time that, while concentrating on the defense of our country against enemies from without, we should be so heedless of those who would destroy it from within.

15

[1961]

Preface to the Second Edition of
The Sea Around Us

WORKING FRANTICALLY
to finish writing
Silent Spring
in 1961, Carson had not planned to take time out to make changes in the new edition of
The Sea Around Us.
But the publication of a juvenile edition of her classic alerted her to certain areas outdated by the rapid advances in oceanography in the decade since its publication. For the new edition she chose not to alter the text itself, but to amend it by adding new material as footnotes in an appendix, and to write a new preface. Although Carson was then working in a field far removed from oceanography, she kept up with the latest research as an elected member of the corporate board of the Woods Hole Marine Biological Laboratory and corresponded regularly with marine scientists there.

By 1961 Carson was deeply disturbed by the evidence of humankind’s despoiling reach even into those parts of the earth she had once considered inviolate. In her new preface, Carson outlines the ominous problem of dumping atomic waste at sea, and records her fear for the future if radioactive chemicals were to continue to contaminate the ocean’s food chains and ecosystems.

THE SEA HAS ALWAYS CHALLENGED
the minds and imagination of men and even today it remains the last great frontier of Earth. It is a realm so vast and so difficult of access that with all our efforts we have explored only a small fraction of its area. Not even the mighty technological developments of this, the Atomic Age, have greatly changed this situation. The awakening of active interest in the exploration of the sea came during the Second World War, when it became clear that our knowledge of the ocean was dangerously inadequate. We had only the most rudimentary notions of the geography of that undersea world over which our ships sailed and through which submarines moved. We knew even less about the dynamics of the sea in motion, although the ability to predict the actions of tides and currents and waves might easily determine the success or failure of military undertakings. The practical need having been so clearly established, the governments of the United States and of other leading sea powers began to devote increasing effort to the scientific study of the sea. Instruments and equipment, most of which had been born of urgent necessity, gave oceanographers the means of tracing the contours of the ocean bottom, of studying the movements of deep waters, and even of sampling the sea floor itself.

These vastly accelerated studies soon began to show that many of the old conceptions of the sea were faulty, and by the mid-point of the century a new picture had begun to emerge. But it was still like a huge canvas on which the artist has indicated the general scheme of his grand design but on which large blank areas await the clarifying touch of his brush.

This was the state of our knowledge of the ocean world when
The Sea Around Us
was written in 1951. Since that time the filling in of many of the blank areas has proceeded and new discoveries have been made. In this second edition of the book I have described the most important of the new findings in a series of notes which will be found in the Appendix. These notes are keyed to appropriate passages in the original text by reference numbers. For example, after the discussion of the Arctic Ocean ending on page 63, the reader may go on to learn of recent discoveries in this area by turning to note 10 in the Appendix.

The 1950’s have comprised an exciting decade in the science of the sea. During this period a manned vehicle has descended to the deepest hole in the ocean floor. During the fifties, also, the crossing of the entire Arctic basin was accomplished by submarines traveling under the ice. Many new features of the unseen floor of the sea have been described, including new mountain ranges that now appear to be linked with others to form the longest and mightiest mountains of the earth – a continuous chain encircling the globe. Deep, hidden rivers in the sea, subsurface currents with the volume of a thousand Mississippis, have been found. During the International Geophysical Year, 60 ships from 40 nations, as well as hundreds of stations on islands and seacoasts, cooperated in an enormously fruitful study of the sea.

Yet the present achievements, exciting though they are, must be considered only a beginning to what is yet to be achieved by probing the vast depths of water that cover most of the surface of the earth. In 1959 a group of distinguished scientists comprising the Committee on Oceanography of the National Academy of Sciences declared that “Man’s knowledge of the oceans is meager indeed compared with their importance to him.” The Committee recommended at least a doubling of basic research on the sea by the United States in the 1960’s; anything less would, in its opinion, “jeopardize the position of oceanography in the United States” compared with other nations and “place us at a disadvantage in the future use of the relief of the lower slopes.”

One of the most fascinating of the projects now planned for the future is an attempt to explore the interior of the earth by drilling a hole three or four miles deep in the bottom of the sea. This project, which is sponsored by the National Academy of Sciences, is designed to penetrate farther than instruments have ever before reached, to the boundary between the earth’s crust and its mantle. This boundary is known to geologists as the Mohorovicic discontinuity (or more familiarly as the Moho) because it was discovered by a Yugoslavian of that name in 1912. The Moho is the point at which earthquake waves show a marked change in velocity, indicating a transition from one kind of material to something quite different. It lies much deeper under the continents than under the oceans, so, in spite of the obvious difficulties of drilling in deep water, an ocean site offers most promise. Above the Moho lies the crust of the earth, composed of relatively light rocks, below it the mantle, a layer some 1800 miles thick enclosing the hot core of the earth. The composition of the crust is not fully known and the nature of the mantle can be deduced only by the most indirect methods. To penetrate these regions and bring back actual samples would therefore be an enormous step forward in understanding the nature of our earth, and would even advance our knowledge of the universe, since the deep structure of the earth may be assumed to be like that of other planets.

As we learn more about the sea through the combined studies of many specialists a new concept that is gradually taking form will almost certainly be strengthened. Even a decade or so ago it was the fashion to speak of the abyss as a place of eternal calm, its black recesses undisturbed by any movement of water more active than a slowly creeping current, a place isolated from the surface and from the very different world of the shallow sea. This picture is rapidly being replaced by one that shows the deep sea as a place of movement and change, an idea that is far more exciting and that possesses deep significance for some of the most pressing problems of our time.

In the new and more dynamic concept, the floor of the deep sea is shaped by racing turbidity currents or mud flows that pour down the slopes of the ocean basins at high speed; it is visited by submarine landslides and stirred by internal tides. The crests and ridges of some of the undersea mountains are swept bare of sediments by currents whose action, in the words of geologist Bruce Heezen, is comparable to “snow avalanches in the Alps (which) sweep down and smother the relief of the lower slopes.”

Far from being isolated from the continents and the shallow seas that surround them, the abyssal plains are now known to receive sediments from the margins of the continents. The effect of the turbidity currents, over the vast stretches of geologic time, is to fill the trenches and the hollows of the abyssal floor with sediment. This concept helps us understand certain hitherto puzzling occurrences. Why, for example, have deposits of sand – surely a product of coastal erosion and the grinding of surf – appeared on the mid-ocean floor? Why have sediments at the mouths of submarine canyons, where they communicate with the abyss, been found to contain such reminders of the land as bits of wood and leaves, and why are there sands containing nuts, twigs, and the bark of trees even farther out on the plains of the abyss? In the powerful downrush of sediment-laden currents, triggered by storms or floods or earthquakes, we now have a mechanism that accounts for these once mysterious facts.

Although the beginnings of our present concept of a dynamic sea go back perhaps several decades, it is only the superb instruments of the past ten years that have allowed us to glimpse the hidden movements of ocean waters. Now we suspect that all those dark regions between the surface and the bottom are stirred by currents. Even such mighty surface currents as the Gulf Stream are not quite what we supposed them to be. Instead of a broad and steadily flowing river of water, the Gulf Stream is now found to consist of narrow racing tongues of warm water that curl back in swirls and eddies. And below the surface currents are others unlike them, running at their own speeds, in their own direction, with their own volume. And below these are still others. Photographs of the sea bottom taken at great depths formerly supposed to be eternally still show ripple marks, a sign that moving waters are sorting over sediments and carrying away the finer particles. Strong currents have denuded the crest of much of the vast range of undersea mountains known as the Atlantic Ridge, and every one of the sea mounts that has been photographed reveals the work of deep currents in ripple marks and scour marks.

Other photographs give fresh evidence of life at great depths. Tracks and trails cross the sea floor and the bottom is studded with small cones built by unknown forms of life or with holes inhabited by small burrowers. The Danish research vessel
Galathea
brought up living animals in dredges operated at great depths, where only recently it was supposed life would be too scanty to permit such sampling.

These findings of the dynamic nature of the sea are not academic; they are not merely dramatic details of a story that has interest but no application. They have a direct and immediate bearing on what has become a major problem of our time.

Although man’s record as a steward of the natural resources of the earth has been a discouraging one, there has long been a certain comfort in the belief that the sea, at least, was inviolate, beyond man’s ability to change and to despoil. But this belief, unfortunately, has proved to be naïve. In unlocking the secrets of the atom, modern man has found himself confronted with a frightening problem – what to do with the most dangerous materials that have ever existed in all the earth’s history, the byproducts of atomic fission. The stark problem that faces him is whether he can dispose of these lethal substances without rendering the earth uninhabitable.