In Paperback: Saved by the Sea

In PaperbackSaved by the Sea:Hope, Heartbreak, and Wonder in the Blue Worldby David HelvargNew World Library, 2015There's an abiding sadness running underneath the bright blue surface of books like David Helvarg's Saved by the Sea: Hope, Heartbreak, and Wonder in the Blue World. You can sense it clearly, for instance, in Carl Safina's Song for the Blue Ocean or Sylvia Earle's The World is Blue or Callum Roberts' The Ocean of Life, and it's very pronounced here in Helvarg's energetic and often quite eloquent evocation of the glories of Earth's waters. The books tend to follow a pattern, starting on the visionary personal level – these are always authors who've strapped on a snorkel and experienced their blue wonderlands first-hand – and rapidly expanding to include the vital statistics:

Salt water covers 71 percent of Earth's surface and provides 97 percent of its livable habitat, from the shark fins I saw breaking the surface to the lowest point on earth, seven miles down in the Mariana Trench near Guam, where only three humans have ever ventured …

These books talk about a vast blue infinity, and Helvarg echoes the theme by stressing the self-evident, the central importance of the oceans to life on Earth:

Although the tropical rain forests have been called the lungs of the planet, the oceans actually absorb far greater amounts of carbon dioxide. Microscopic phytoplankton in the top layer of the sea acts as a biological pump, extracting some 2.5 billion tons of organic carbon out of the atmosphere annually, replacing it with about half the life-giving oxygen we need to survive …

Helvarg's book is fast-paced, very effectively personal, and ranges all over the world's wet places. He stresses conservation and connection to the natural world, and anyone who's ever drawn renewal from a large body of water will nod in agreement at his urgings about how precious such bodies are. And Helvarg makes the point that this connection extends to all people and to all life on Earth, despite the fact that the explorations of humans seem always aimed outward, rather than toward the glowing mystery in their midst:

To date we've mapped less than 10 percent of the ocean, but we've mapped 100 percent of the moon and Mars. The funny thing is that when we send probes to Mars, other parts of the solar system, and beyond, what's the first thing we look for as a sign of life? Water! And here we have a whole blue swimming pool of a planet that we hardly connect with even though we all evolved on both an individual and evolutionary basis from salt water …

But it's just when you start thinking about all that huge unexplored water that the implicit sadness of books like Saved by the Sea strikes you again. In the course of the last 100 years, Earth's oceans have been hunted and polluted and heated to extents undreamt of in the rest of human history combined, and the damages increase with every decade. The kind of conservation Helvarg champions cannot hope to keep pace with the explosion of human population and the concomitant hunger and waste of that population, and as the oceans continue to grow hotter, not only will their life-forms radically alter, but the storms they birth will become more and more deadly to life on land. The seas that represent salvation for Helvarg and so many similar writers will become sources of poison and peril for future generations that will read these books with wonder.But for now, Saved by the Sea still breathes with wonder and optimism. Nature-loving readers should take a copy of the book down to the water and read it there.