Name: The Ocean of Life
ISBN: 9780670023547

The Ocean of Life

Who can forget the sense of wonder with which they discovered as a child the creatures of the deep? In this vibrant hymn to the sea, one of the world's foremost conservation biologists, known as the "Rachel Carson of the fish world" (The New York Times), takes us back in time to tell the story of man and the sea, from the earliest traces of water on earth to the oceans as we know them today. If you spend time by the sea, you might have noticed that jellyfish are more common now, and fish are smaller and harder to find. But there's a lot more going on beneath the waves that you can't see. What Callum Roberts does in this powerful book is pull together all of the disparate strands of marine science to tell the story of the enormous transformation unfolding around us. The Ocean of Life considers the course of currents first discovered by Benjamin Franklin and the latest developments in ocean chemistry. It looks at pollution and noise pollution, rising tides and temperatures, industrial fishing and aquaculture. It covers everything from shrimp farming in China to the fate of sea fans on Caribbean reefs. It helps us understand how things that we think of in isolation are interconnected and offers clear insights into how we can and must change course. Because our oceans are changing faster than at any time in human history and we are the agents of that transformation.

What Hacker News says

patagoniaNov 2018

Callum Roberts wrote “The Ocean of Life: The Fate of Man and the Sea” in 2013.

Everyone should read it. This article is discussing issues that are not at all new. That we treat it as new information is a symptom of the problem.

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467568985476May 2017

There is a great book by a marine biologist that goes into detail about these topics. It's called The Ocean of Life - The Fate of Man and the Sea by Callum Roberts. It was recommended to me here on HN several years ago, and I think that recommendation bears repeating. He goes into great detail about conservation topics for half the book, and the other half has to do with climate change and its effects on the oceans (and how that affects humanity).

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felixbraunApr 2016

Excellent related book: »The Ocean of Life: The Fate of Man and the Sea« by Callum Roberts.

http://www.amazon.com/The-Ocean-Life-Fate-Man/dp/067002354X

https://twitter.com/Prof_CallumYork

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johnloeberJan 2015

The best book I've read on these matters is The Ocean of Life: The Fate of Man and the Sea by Callum Roberts. It's about 400 pages long and meticulously details our effects on the marine environment (though in an entertaining and accessible manner).

We're looking at cataclysmic changes in the oceans. It's not too late to revert course, but overfishing and pollution (acidification, in particular) have already changed our marine ecosystems, and they will continue to do so. Great diversity has been lost, while jellies and other more primitive lifeforms used to less hospitable conditions are now thriving.

The bizarre tragedy comes, in part, from the dilution hypothesis: it's commonly accepted that the oceans are really big, so big that they can withstand our meddling. While the oceans are big, they're neither that large nor are they totally homogeneous: there are many marine ecosystems, all of which are fragile. But most of these marine ecosystems are still large enough to change slowly -- too slowly to be immediately noticed by laypersons.

The slowness of change in the marine ecosystems makes environmentalism a politically difficult platform: good policies do not yield immediately measurable positive results, and while the threat is grave, it is creeping sufficiently slowly for action to be continuously procrastinated.

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