Book 49 - Deep Blue Home - Julia Whitty

I'm a tree-hugger. There. I've said it. I'm a tree-hugger. Not in the radical activist way, mind you. I don't believe in spiking trees, and you are not going to catch me naked on the street corner, espousing vegan philosophy with PETA activists. You won't even catch me storming a Japanese whaling vessel in a rubber dinghy. Nonetheless, I'm a tree-hugger. And some of you are too.

You know who you are.

You are a person who knows that nitrogen runoff from industrial farming techniques are creating huge dead zones in our oceans, where nothing can live.

You are a person who knows that our planet is being stripped of its biodiversity, threatening the balance of earth's ecosystems and threatening the existence of mankind itself.

You are a person who thinks it is irrational to think that seven billion people burning fossil fuels does not have an impact on the planet's ecology.

Come on. Say it with me. My name is "***SAY YOUR NAME***," and I'm a tree hugger.

This book is for you.

Book 49 - Deep Blue Home - Julia Whitty

Julia Whitty is a former documentary filmmaker who writes on environmental issues for magazines such as Harper's and Mother Jones. The Fragile Edge, her first book on oceans, has won several awards for creative non-fiction including the Pen USA Award and the Kiryama Prize. In Deep Blue Home, Whitty explores the ecosystems of the world's oceans and the importance of these ecosystems to the survival of life on this planet.

Whitty opens the book by flashing back more than twenty-five years to her days working on Isla Rasa, a tiny island in the Gulf of California. Here she studied the thousands of migratory birds that flocked to the island: elegant terns, least-storm petrels, and the peregrine falcons that hunt them. Later she takes us to the coast of Newfoundland, where she augments her encounter with a giant sea turtle by explaining how these cold-blooded animals have adapted to freezing cold water temperatures by pumping warmer blood from the middle of their bodies out to their extremities. She tells of a close encounter with a sperm whale, so close that she had to contemplate whether she would be dragged under when it sounded. When she introduces us to a new species of animal she makes reference to its position on Red List, a list that tracks the endangerment status of thousands of species.

The book is not just facts about various animals in the ocean, however. She discusses the life-cycle of the ocean, and how it affects the life-cycle of the entire planet. She discusses global water circulation patterns such as thermohaline circulation, and how desalinization due to melting ice caps threaten to shut down this vital circulation pattern. She discusses how industrial fishing techniques have diminished the populations of many species to the point where it is unsure that they can recover. She discusses the problems of this overfishing in the context of trophic cascade, the idea that over-fishing a particular species has ramifications for other species, both those that hunt that species, as well as those that are hunted by it.

Reading this book is somewhat like listening to the narration of a nature documentary without the picture. Whitty's vivid descriptions allow your mind's eye to fill in the video portion, and her passion for the subject exudes from every page. She evokes Steinbeck and Melville in her narrative, and she deftly interweaves tales of the world and the sea from Indian, Norse, Roman, and Greek mythology, reminding us that the importance of protecting the sea is not a knowledge that we have not yet gained, but rather one we have forgotten. At the beginning of this post I said this book was for tree-huggers, but maybe more importantly, it is for those people who aren't.