What we go to nature in search of, whether it sparks feelings of homeliness, duty, estrangement, or enchantment-this isn’t a neutral, intuitive matter. How hyperbolic that sounds now! Though I stand by the idea that “the environment” is an intimate subject. Rereading the quote I remember how much this idea once appealed to me: “the artist” with their “pure essence,” driven to depict an environment that betrays their inner life as much as their place in the world and landscape.
Stow wasn’t a natural history writer, though he wrote powerfully about drought and desert and the extractive industries that have shaped (or cursed) the fortunes of many in my home state. The external factors, geographical and sociological, are so mingled with his ways of seeing and states of mind that he may find it impossible to say what he means by his environment, except in the most personal and introspective terms. It is the point where mind verges on the pure essence of him, that unchanging observer that for want of a better term we must call the soul. The boundary between an individual and his environment is not his skin. environment, as the artist meets it, is almost too complex a thing to be written about at all. Rebecca Giggs: Throughout my twenties I kept a quote from the Western Australian novelist Randolph Stow taped to the inside cover of my diary:
I e-mailed Giggs last week to discuss Carson’s legacy, the future of the oceans, and the tragedy of beached whales.Īrianne Gonzalez: Are there specific natural history books or authors you encountered early in your development as a writer that you continue to return to?
Her debut book, Fathoms: The World in the Whale (2020), explored the lives of whales and the pollution of their habitats, andwon the 2021 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction. Her work has appeared in The Atlantic and The New York Times Magazine and has been anthologized in The Best Australian Science Writing. Giggs is a science writer from Perth, Australia, who has written about, among other subjects, jellyfish swarms and the history of leeches.
“But if Silent Spring is about rupture,” Giggs writes, “then the overarching project of Carson’s sea writing was to achieve a feat of connection-these are profoundly holistic books, tracing the bonds between natural forces and organisms.” While Carson was a marine biologist, she is best known for her landmark 1962 book, Silent Spring,which highlighted the environmental harms of pesticides-and, by extension, the insidious effects of humans on the planet. In the December 22, 2022, issue of the magazine, Rebecca Giggs reviews The Sea Trilogy, an omnibus edition of Rachel Carson’s books from the 1940s about ocean life.
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