Deborah Cramer

Great Waters

A remarkable scientific meditation on and spiritual exploration of one of our least appreciated natural resources—the Atlantic Ocean.

Not since Rachel Carson's brilliant classic The Sea Around Us fifty years ago has a writer been able to give voice so compellingly to the ocean—its mythic history and its precarious future. In the course of an ocean voyage, Deborah Cramer weaves the details of the history and science of the Atlantic into a brilliant tapestry that documents our many-faceted reliance on the sea, our betrayal of that bond, the changing landscape of the ocean floor, and the threatened life of its inhabitants.

Bringing together the scientific research of physical oceanographers, geologists, biologists, and chemists from both sides of the Atlantic, Cramer presents a devastating report of the environmental damage that has affected these waters. She also explores the ocean herself and describes with vivid passion the intricate and fragile web of marine life, the visible disappearance of schools of fish plundered by the competitive fishing industry, and the changing rhythms of the Atlantic from the rough, chilly Gulf of Maine to the calm, weedy currents of the Sargasso Sea.

"Deborah Cramer makes clear just how small the boundless Atlantic really is. Small in the sweet sense of being a collection of diverse and fascinating neighborhoods; small, too, in the scary sense of no longer being able to absorb the cumulative effects of our carelessness. If you've ever walked the shores of this great ocean and stared off beyond the surf wondering what lay there—well, this fine book will let you know." —Bill McKibben, author of Long Distance: A Year of Living Strenuously and The End of Nature

"Deborah Cramer has ventured into the sea, nature's least understood frontier, and has written powerfully of the threats to its continuing productivity. . . . She has illuminated the causes of its decline and pointed to the consequences for climate, weather, food supplies, flooding, human life. . . . Read this book and stop eating Patagonian Toothfish (Chilean seabass). It's going fast." —William K. Reilly, chairman, World Wildlife Fund; former administrator, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency