Beauty and synergy: endless oceans, the conqueror worm

First published in 1951, Rachel Carson's "The Sea Around Us" spent a year and a half on the bestseller list. It won the John Burroughs Medal and the National Book Award. A documentary about it won an Oscar. It was translated into 28 languages. Not long after publishing it, Carson would begin work on "Silent Spring." The rest, as they say, is history.

Now Oxford University Press has reissued "The Sea Around Us" in a majestic edition, incorporating attractive photographs, a preface, foreword, introduction, and an excellent afterword by Brian J. Skinner. The pages are broad and smooth and heavy; turning them, you feel you are in the presence of greatness.

But what is so sweet and powerful about this book, written before we had satellites or an understanding of plate tectonics, is that it doesn't need any of the new edition's upmarket trappings. The prose is true and fluid and above all evocative, and delivers all the passion and wonder it did a half-century ago. Sure, as Carl Safina writes in his foreword, Carson "remains a spiritual leader, capable of conveying a sense of direction toward how we ought to poise ourselves in the world," and you can learn plenty about the oceans from her, but I think this book should be read first and foremost because it has permanent artistic value, because it is literature. And I mean literature in the best sense: popular, beautiful, deeply moving.

"There is then," she writes, describing the effects of planetary currents, "no water that is wholly of the Pacific, or wholly of the Atlantic, or of the Indian or the Antarctic. The surf that we find exhilarating at Virginia Beach or at La Jolla today may have lapped at the base of Antarctic icebergs or sparkled in the Mediterranean sun, years ago, before it moved through dark and unseen waterways to the place we find it now." She brings this same poetic rigor to sea-floor topography, sedimentation, Atlantis, tsunamis, and a host of other marine topics. Her chapter describing seasonal changes in surface waters is so good, so vivid and full of velocity, I feel like tearing out the pages and pasting them to the walls of my office. Indeed, no offense to Oxford's lovely publication, but I'd almost rather urge this book on readers as a creased $5 paperback, something to keep beneath the thwart of your canoe, or in a pocket of your fishing vest, or on the nightstand in whatever room in your house is closest to the sea.

Another new book, by another passionate and inquisitive writer, is "The Earth Moved: On the Remarkable Achievements of Earthworms," by Amy Stewart. Part gardening journal, part systematic survey, part paean to worms, her book is in many ways about how "the smallest changes [can] result in enormous outcomes." (Think of millions of worms inexorably digesting a couple of tons of soil, gradually burying the ruins of a city.) Stewart's theme of incremental change feeds Carson's book, too, as it feeds so much of science, from "The Origin of Species" to your town's recycling program.

Although you can read this slim book in an afternoon, Stewart addresses, in some depth, everything from worm regeneration to nematodes to a night crawler's "mental abilities." Carson make an appearance, as does Darwin, who spent the final years of his life studying earthworms. There's also a handy epilogue in case you want to start a worm bin of your own.

In my favorite parts of "The Earth Moved," Stewart's passion slips her restraints. She calls worms "custodians of the planet" and claims "there is not a finer pet anywhere." "They consume," she writes, "they transform, they change the earth." She even tentatively sanctions a French scientist's claim that "worms could be responsible for the development of the world's great civilizations." And indeed you find yourself considering it: Didn't most major cultures emerge where the soil had been sufficiently tilled and enriched by countless earthworms?

And yet, despite their position near the foundation of so many terrestrial ecosystems, worms -- like the denizens of deep oceans -- are still strangers to us. It is the refrain of everyone Stewart interviews: "There just aren't a lot of people looking into this yet."

The reasons for this are probably obvious: Earthworms are not, at first glance, all that glamorous; it's hard to get money to study them; and their lightless and cramped world is very difficult to examine. Yet nearly every page of Stewart's book testifies to their relevance. I think of Carson's claim that, at the end of World War II, our understanding of the seas was "dangerously inadequate."

Carson's legacy is proof that science books matter, that good prose can change the world. On its own scale, Stewart's book paddles along in Carson's wake. Read her book and you'll start to see how the rhododendron bed in front of your house is a kind of Mars for frontier science. Stewart puts it like this: "In my own backyard, looking down at the soil, I feel the way I do when I look out at the ocean, where great blue whales and giant squid swim the unknown depths, where sharks hunt and sea cucumbers wave with the currents. . . . How much of the underground world of the giant earthworm is still unexplored and unknown?"

Anthony Doerr is the author of "The Shell Collector."