Deep Water
the world in the ocean
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- ¥1,800
発行者による作品情報
‘Wise, compassionate, and urgent.’ Robert Macfarlane, author of Underland
A Bookseller Nonfiction Editor’s Choice for March 2024
Plunge into the depths of the unknown in this thrilling work of nonfiction that combines science, history, and nature writing to explore the deepest recesses of the natural world.
Oceans created, shaped, and sustain not just human life, but all life on Earth, and perhaps beyond it. They are our history — from evolution to exploration and colonialism; our present — from beach holidays to transporting food and goods; and, as rising sea levels and warming water reshape coastlines and the climate, our future.
Deep Water is a reckoning with humankind’s complex relationship with the ocean, a book shaped by tidal movements and vast currents, and lit by the presence of other minds and other ways of being. It speaks directly and uncompromisingly of the urgency of the environmental catastrophe that is overtaking us, but is also suffused with the glories of the ocean, and alert to the extraordinary efforts of the scientists and researchers whose work helps us understand its secrets. Immense in scope but also profoundly personal, it offers vital new ways of understanding humanity’s place on our planet, and shows that the oceans might yet save us all.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This expansive report from novelist Bradley (Ghost Species) studies ocean ecosystems as a means of exploring the interconnectedness of life on Earth. Emphasizing the fragility and complexity of ecological communities, Bradley notes that the industrial-scale slaughter of whales in the early 20th century counterintuitively resulted in an 80% drop in the krill population because whale "excrement provides vital nutrients for the phytoplankton upon which the krill depend." Fish are more sophisticated than they're given credit for, Bradley contends, citing research that found "rainbowfish learn to associate signals with food... twice as fast as dogs" and that sticklebacks ostracize group members who don't take their turn in the vulnerable position at the front of the school. Such studies underscore what will be lost if humans don't rein in climate change, Bradley argues, discussing how rising sea levels are endangering Australian sea turtles by submerging their traditional breeding grounds. Bradley weaves natural history, climate studies, and trivia into an elegant whole that drives home the dire threat global warming poses to the ocean, all delivered in plaintive prose ("The toxic legacies of human industry written into the bodies of ocean creatures are a reminder that the deep is not a place of forgetting, but an ark of memory"). It's a galvanizing call to action.
