Bill McKibben proclaimed nature’s demise in 1989. But Americans who cared about DDT’s poisonous effect and the extinctions that would follow had been warned almost three decades earlier. Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962) famously opens by imagining a world denuded of plant and animal life. In fact, it wasn’t only Americans Carson managed to terrify. The opening scene of Cixin Liu’s Three Body Problem imagines the book’s effect on a Chinese activist scientist during the Cultural Revolution. (Despairing over humanity’s war on nature and itself, she invites extraterrestrials to wipe us out.)

Carson’s writing career had begun, though, with something even stranger than her chilling vision of a silent Earth. Between 1941 and 1955, a trilogy of books about the sea established her reputation as an eloquent interpreter of nature. The first book of the trilogy, Under the Sea-Wind, is informed by Carson’s work on various reports and brochures as an aquatic biologist at the Fish and Wildlife Service. Its striking aim was to avoid “human bias” in the book’s narrative perspective:

I … let my imagination go down through the water and piece together bits of scientific fact until I could see the whole life of those creatures as they lived them in that strange sea world … The ocean is too big and vast and its forces are too mighty to be much affected by human activity. So I decided the author as a person or a human observer should never enter the story.

The result is a lyrical and immersive account of the ecologies of the Atlantic and Eastern seaboard. Organized as a narrative triptych, it follows the seasonal migrations of a black skimmer, a mackerel, and an eel. Its intimate narratives are not measured by hours or miles, but by the metabolic, tidal, and reproductive rhythms that define those lives, following continent- and ocean-spanning journeys as each creature hunts, spawns, and dodges looming threats.

In 1974, the philosopher Thomas Nagel asked an imagination-taxing question: “What is it like to be a bat?” Though she herself visited the ocean’s depths only once, in cumbersome mid-century diving gear, Carson anticipated Nagel by several decades, exploring the world beneath the waves through the experience of those who live there.

To do this, she drew from recent zoological explanations for the “lateral lines” possessed by many fish—sensitive organs that help them hunt, hide, and navigate by detecting subtle changes in pressure—to inhabit the sensorium of predator and prey:

The blade or cutwater plowed a miniature furrow over the placid sheet of the sound, setting up wavelets of its own and sending vibrations thudding down through the water to rebound from the sandy bottom. The wave messages were received by blennies and killfish that were roving the shallows on the alert for food. In the fish world many things are told by sound waves. … And so at the passing of the skimmer the small fishes came nosing at the surface, curious and hungry.

Inspired by the British naturalist Henry Williamson’s Tarka the Otter (1927), Carson gave names to her focal characters: Rynchops the black skimmer, Scomber the mackerel, Anguila the eel. She drew their unusual names from the genus of each species; cobbled from Greek and Latin, they exhibit the magpie logic of all scientific nomenclature.

These names are also one of the few markers of human perspective in Under the Sea-Wind. Humans live far from the center of narrative attention. They show up at the periphery, fishing or gazing curiously down over railings and bowlines. The conclusion of Under the Sea-Wind adopts a perspective so resolutely antihuman it remains startling almost a century later:

As the waiting of the eels off the mouth of the bay was only an interlude in a long life filled with constant change, so the relation of sea to coast and mountain ranges was that of a moment in geologic time. For once more the mountains would be worn away by the endless erosion of water carried in silt to the sea, and once more all the coast would be water again, and the places of its cities and towns would belong to the sea.

During the two decades between Under the Sea-Wind and Silent Spring, Carson recognized how human activity threatened the web of interdependencies on which human and nonhuman life depend. She came to consider the sea an overfished dumping ground for toxic chemicals and nuclear fallout rather than the exclusive domain of immutable natural forces. Yet the radically nonhuman world of Under the Sea-Wind offers something that Silent Spring cannot: a portrait of nature as autonomous, resilient, and indifferent to human activity. In pressing the ocean’s living complexity into a compact literary form, it achieves a geological and evolutionary perspective on the crises humans face. Carson’s earlier work reminds us that in the longer view, nature will abide: Polluted, acidified, and overfished, the sea will still rise and fall, and evolution will roll on.

In this way, the books could not feel more different—until we consider their epigraphs. Silent Spring begins with a line from John Keats’s “La Belle Dame sans Merci” (1819) and the famous toll of its terminal line, “and no birds sing.”

Under the Sea-Wind begins with a passage from Charles Algernon Swinburne’s “A Forsaken Garden” (1875):

Earth, stones, and thorns of the wild ground growing,

While the sun and the rain live, these shall be;

Till a last wind’s breath upon all these blowing

Roll the sea.

“A Forsaken Garden” describes a seaside terrace long after its human inhabitants vanish, as its aesthetic order decays and its gardens and paths yield to tide, wind, and rain. Swinburne adapted Keats’s dragging rhythm into closing lines of unrelenting bleakness: “Love was dead,” “We shall sleep,” and “Death lies dead” are requiems for human life.

Swinburne’s stark reverie foreshadows Alan Weisman’s The World Without Us (2007), a work of speculative history that imagines the decay and rewilding of various built landscapes that, in turn, inspired Dipesh Chakrabarty’s landmark essay “The Climate of History” (2009). Under the Sea-Wind is equally relentless in its recognition that the delicate but evolving structure of any ecosystem holds a mirror to the limited history and future of humanity itself.

When Scomber the mackerel encounters a gill net drifting in the open ocean, Carson offers a vision of human debris colonized by aquatic life:

Tonight no fish would have tried to pass through the net, for all its meshes were hung with tiny warning lamps. Luminous protozoa and water fleas and amphipods clung to the wet twine in the dark sea, and the pulse of the ocean stirred from their bodies countless sparks of light. It was as though all the myriad lesser fry of the sea—the plants as small as dust motes and the animals tinier than a sand grain—drifting from birth to death in an ocean of infinite size and endless fluidity, seized upon the meshes of the gill net as the one firm reality in their uneasy world and clung to it with protoplasmic hair and cilia, with tentacle and claw.

Silent Spring galvanized widespread protest and reform that led to the passage of the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts, which established the EPA, and animated world-wide environmental campaigns.

Under the Sea-Wind, by imagining the undersea world without us, may yet inspire readers to preserve that world, as much for its own sake as for ours. If we take a longer view of all Carson’s writing, we might find a new message: All is not lost. In fact, all cannot be lost.