DEEP WATER

A novelist, activist, and naturalist writes a paean to the sea.

Bradley, editor of The Penguin Book of the Ocean, reminds readers that we live on a planet whose surface is mostly water. “We spend the first nine months of our lives suspended in the liquid of the womb; once we emerge our tissues are made of water, our blood salt as the sea,” he writes. With a nod to Rachel Carson, who also wrote about “the ocean’s mysteries” and “the way its meanings haunt and elude us,” Bradley brings the science up to date with the latest findings of oceanographers and biologists. He begins with a history of the Earth; soon after the planet cooled, water appeared. Bradley delivers a vivid, expert education on the ocean’s makeup and behavior, including valuable information on currents, tides, sea creatures, reefs, glaciers and sea ice, abyssal depths (amazingly rich in life), beaches, and resource extraction, with an emphasis on the heavy hand of human exploitation. In the 20th century, scientists mourned species extinction and disappearing forests, but the current century’s onslaught of climate change, massive chemical and plastic pollution, and technology that literally vacuums up life from the ocean and ores from its floor means that many modern natural histories—Bradley’s included—deliver as much pain as pleasure. Human cultures barely disturbed the ocean until technology from Western Europe exploded across the world after the Middle Ages, followed by the industrial revolution. While historians do not ignore the despicable international slave trade, colonialism, and racism that followed, Bradley devotes more space than the average natural historian. His warnings about the mass human disaster already in progress, including continued warming and rising sea levels, are more focused, though equally disturbing.

A satisfying tribute to the wonders of the ocean and the myriad dangers it faces.