Deep Blue Home

An Intimate Ecology of Our Wild Ocean

Julia Whitty

• Publisher: Harper Perennial
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN:
  9780618119813
• eBook ISBN:
  9780547487076
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Environmental Science
• Index: Biological Sciences

At the center of Deep Blue Home—a penetrating exploration of the ocean as single vast current and of the creatures dependent on it—is Whitty's description of the three-dimensional ocean river, far more powerful than the Nile or the Amazon, encircling the globe. It's a watery force connected to the earth's climate control and so to the eventual fate of the human race. 

Whitty's thirty-year career as a documentary filmmaker and diver has given her sustained access to the scientists dedicated to the study of an astonishing range of ocean life, from the physiology of "extremophile" life forms to the strategies of nesting seabirds to the ecology of "whale falls" (what happens upon the death of a behemoth). 

No stranger to extreme adventure, Whitty travels the oceanside and underwater world from the Sea of Cortez to Newfoundland to Antarctica. In the Galapagos, in one of the book's most haunting encounters, she realizes: "I am about to learn the answer to my long-standing question about what would happen to a person in the water if a whale sounded directly alongside—would she, like a person afloat beside a sinking ship, be dragged under too?" 

This book provides extraordinary armchair entree to gripping adventure, cutting-edge science, and an intimate understanding of our deep blue home.

Notes

The Very Air Miraculous

1. Steinbeck’s classic tale of travel, science, and comedy, The Log from the Sea of Cortez (Viking Press, 1951), was his second attempt to tell the story of his 1940 journey with Ed Ricketts. The first book, Sea of Cortez: A Leisurely Journal of Travel and Research (Viking Press, 1941), cowritten with Ricketts, drew heavily on Ricketts’s journal entries as well as his species list of marine life. That book never sold well, and three years after Ricketts’s death Steinbeck revised it, adding his indelible portrait of the marine biologist and subtracting the species list.

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2. Arthur Cleveland Bent’s Life Histories of North American Gulls and Terns (1921) was the second of the twenty-one volumes that consumed most of his adult life. Publication of the volumes spanned forty-nine years, with the last two installments published posthumously.

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The River That Was Nowhere and Everywhere

1. A scientific overview of Rasa’s breeding ecology can be found in the chapter “Breeding Dynamics of Heermann’s Gulls,” by Enriqueta Velarde and Exequiel Ezcurra, in A New Biogeography of the Sea of Cortés, ed. Ted J. Case, Martin L. Cody, and Exequiel Ezcurra (Oxford University Press, 2002). This invaluable book compiles a wealth of scientific knowledge of the region’s flora and fauna.

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2. In The Future of Life (Alfred A. Knopf, 2002), Wilson employs a compelling mix of science, philosophy, and fiction—notably in the Prologue, where the author holds an imaginary conversation with Henry David Thoreau on the state of Walden Pond and Earth itself today.

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3. For more on the loss of biodiversity, see my article “Gone: Mass Extinction and the Hazards of Earth’s Vanishing Biodiversity,” Mother Jones, May/June 2007.

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4. The Red List is fully catalogued online and includes species accounts as well as links to bibliographies, data, and photos: http://iucnredlist.org/.

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5. James R. Spotila, Sea Turtles: A Complete Guide to Their Biology, Behavior, and Conservation (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004), summarizes the life history, ecology, and conservation status of the world’s sea turtles.

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6. Leopold’s luminous description of the extinct delta of the Colorado River is included in his collection of essays, A Sand County Almanac (Oxford University Press, 1949).

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Hunger Island

1. Mark H. Carr, T. W. Anderson, and M. A. Hixon, “Biodiversity, Population Regulation, and the Stability of Coral-Reef Fish Communities,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 99, no. 17 (2002): 11241–45.

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2. Thomas Bowen’s book, Unknown Island: Seri Indians, Europeans, and San Esteban Island in the Gulf of California (University of New Mexico Press, 2000), details a fascinating history of guano mining throughout the Midriff Islands, including Isla Rasa.

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3. Griffing Bancroft’s long-out-of-print book The Flight of the Least Petrel: Lower California: A Cruise (G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1932) is an account of his ornithological cruise, long before Ricketts and Steinbeck’s, including his visit to Isla Rasa. Bancroft took a peculiar dislike to the island’s breeding terns: “Rattled and brainless, their minds appear weak to the point of representing the minimum of avian mentality. They cause me to wonder why evolution has been so inconsistent as to have created such beautiful things and then to have endowed them with so little intelligence.”

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4. A treasure trove of scientific information is contained in the online archive the Birds of North America Online, Cornell Lab of Ornithology and American Ornithologists’ Union.

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One Hundred Days of Solitude

1. Translation from The Sea of Cortez: A Place with a Future (Pulsar, 1998), by Alejandro Robles, Exequiel Ezcurra, and Cuahtémoc Léon.

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Whorls

1. Gary Paul Nabhan’s account of Seri life, Singing the Turtles to Sea: The Comcáac (Seri) Art and Science of Reptiles (University of California Press, 2003), includes many examples of the Seri’s exhaustive nature knowledge, much of it embedded in their unique language, which is an isolate. Nabhan provides a vocabulary.

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Mirage

1. Brown’s observations are included in Arthur Cleveland Bent’s Life Histories of North American Petrels and Pelicans and Their Allies (1922; reprint, Dover, 1964).

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Emotional Ecology

1. Anthony’s observations appear in Arthur Cleveland Bent’s Life Histories of North American Petrels and Pelicans and Their Allies.

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The Distant Geography of Water

1. See Peter L. Lutz, J. A. Musick, and J. Wyneken, eds., The Biology of Sea Turtles, vol. 2 (CRC Press, 2003), which includes chapters on ancient and historic interactions between sea turtles and people, turtle morphology, sensory biology, reproduction, physiology, migrations, feeding ecology, life histories, population ecology, conservation, and sea turtle management.

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The Ecumenical Sea

1. I drew heavily on John Lindow’s fascinating and scholarly accounts and interpretations in his Norse Mythology: A Guide to the Gods, Heroes, Rituals, and Beliefs (Oxford University Press, 2001), for my depictions of Ægir, the other jötnar, and the Scandinavian gods. His chapter “The Nature of Mythic Time” provides a haunting window into the mind of the Norse past.

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The Tempest from the Eagle’s Wings

1. This version of Sæmund’s verse appears in Legends and Superstitions of the Sea and of Sailors in All Lands and at All Times (Belford, Clarke and Co., 1885), by Fletcher S. Bassett, Lieutenant, U.S. Navy.

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2. Farley Mowat’s Sea of Slaughter (McClelland and Stewart, 1984) is a searing account of the brutal decline of biodiversity along Canadian shores. Mowat signed my copy “Up the Animals!!”—a memento of an unforgettable day filming him in his Nova Scotia home, after which he genially slammed a whiskey bottle onto his kitchen table and roared, “I worked for you all day. Now you’ll drink with me.”

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One Meritorious Act

1. Peterson and Fischer’s 1955 book, Wild America (reprint, Mariner Books, 1997), includes an engaging account and charming sketches of their long hike in 1953 across the boggy landscape to and from Cape Saint Mary’s. Thirty-two years later I had the great good fortune to spend a day filming Roger Tory Peterson at his home in Old Lyme, Connecticut. I was the junior member of the film crew and shyly confessed toward the end of the day that I was approaching four hundred identified species on my birder’s life list. Peterson was genuinely thrilled to hear of my modest accomplishment and twice repeated it to his wife, Virgin...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Contents
• Copyright
• Dedication
• ISLA RASA
• The Very Air Miraculous
• The River That Was Nowhere and Everywhere
• Another Heaven
• Hunger Island
• The Ornament of the Body
• One Hundred Days of Solitude
• Whorls
• The Unreefed World
• The Epitome of Unrestrained Freedom
• Mirage
• Emotional Ecology
• The Anti-Bodies of Quiet
• Everything Is Already Brilliant
• THE UNDERWATER RIVERS OF THE WORLD
• The Distant Geography of Water
• The Ecumenical Sea
• Deepwater Formation
• The Tempest from the Eagle’s Wings
• One Meritorious Act
• Jump Cut
• Lament for the Thirty Million
• All Time Is Now
• Trophic Cascade
• Bone Rafters
• Soundsabers
• Salting Down the Lean Missionary
• The Existence of a World Previous to Ours
• Reading God
• Nemesis
• The Inexplicable Waves
• At the End of Hunger
• THE AIRBORNE OCEAN
• Serpent Cave
• Black Mirror
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• About the Author
• Connect with HMH