I found myself excitedly telling my friends about this book, saying: “It’s such a great coffee table book that it almost makes me want to buy a coffee table.”
Joking aside, I’ve long been a fan of Sylvia Earle. I even had a chance to sit down and chat with her quite some years ago in Seattle because we both shared a special love for the ocean.
Blue Hope: Exploring and Caring for Earth’s Magnificent Ocean (2014) doesn’t just reflect her concern that we learn to live in harmony with the ocean, but it magnifies it. Although it is an excellent and broad overview of some of the challenges we face, such as loss of biodiversity, it also emphasizes hope and actions which can make positive differences. In the book she says: “We must take care of the ocean as if our lives depend on it, because they do.”
The title is pretty descriptive of the general theme of the book, but it didn’t prepare me for just how magnificent the imagery and associated text were.
The main prose of each of the seven chapters is just a few pages of Sylvia’s thoughts and observations which provide some conceptual context for the underwater imagery which follows. And the beautiful, large u/w images which make up most of the book are accompanied by quotes from a wide variety of relevant people such as, Jacques Cousteau, Rachel Carson, Herman Melville, Hillary Clinton, T. S. Eliot, Theodore Roosevelt, Susan Casey, Don Walsh, William Beebe, etc.
It was a lucky day when I stumbled upon this book at the library! Here’s a link where you can find out more…
