Deep Water: The World in the Ocean

by James Bradley

In this thrilling work—a blend of history, science, nature writing, and environmentalism—acclaimed writer James Bradley plunges into the unknown to explore the deepest recesses of the natural world.

Seventy-one percent of the earth’s surface is ocean. These waters created, shaped, and continue to sustain not just human life, but all life on Planet Earth, and perhaps beyond it. They serve as the stage for our cultural history—driving human development from evolution through exploration, colonialism, and the modern era of global leisure and trade. They are also the harbingers of the future—much of life on Earth cannot survive if sea levels are too low or too high, temperatures too cold or too warm. Our oceans are vast spaces of immense wonder and beauty, and our relationship to them is innate and awe inspired.

Deep Water is both a lyrically written personal meditation and an intriguing wide-ranging reported epic that reckons with our complex connection to the seas. It is a story shaped by tidal movements and deep currents, lit by the insights of philosophers, scientists, artists and other great minds. Bradley takes readers from the atomic creation of the oceans, to the wonders within, such as fish migrations guided by electromagnetic sensing. He describes the impacts of human population shifts by boat and speaks directly and uncompromisingly to the environmental catastrophe that is already impacting our lives. It is also a celebration of the ocean’s glories and the extraordinary efforts of the scientists and researchers who are unlocking its secrets. These myriad strands are woven together into a tapestry of life that captures not only our relationship with the planet, but our past, and perhaps most importantly, what lies ahead for us.

A brilliant blend of Robert MacFarlane’s Underland, Susan Casey’s The Underworld, and Simon Winchester’s Pacific and The Atlantic, Deep Water taps into the essence of our plant and who we are.

Genres: Nonfiction, Science, Nature, History, Biology, Natural History, Audiobook

Audiobook

First published March 28, 2024

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name. See this thread for more information.

James is the author of five novels: the critically acclaimed climate change narratives, Ghost Species (Hamish Hamilton 2020) and Clade (Hamish Hamilton 2015); The Resurrectionist (Picador 2006), which explores the murky world of underground anatomists in Victorian England and was featured as one of Richard and Judy's Summer Reads in 2008; The Deep Field (Sceptre 1999), which is set in the near future and tells the story of a love affair between a photographer and a blind palaeontologist; and Wrack (Vintage 1997) about the search for a semi-mythical Portuguese wreck. He has also written The Change Trilogy for young adults. a book of poetry, Paper Nautilus, and edited two anthologies, The Penguin Book of the Ocean and Blur, a collection of stories by young Australian writers. His first book of non-fiction, Deep Water: the World in the Ocean will be published in 2024.

Twice one of The Sydney Morning Herald's Best Young Novelists, his books have won The Age Fiction Book of the Year Award, the Fellowship of Australian Writers Literature Award and the Kathleen Mitchell Award, and have been shortlisted for awards such as the Miles Franklin Award, the Commonwealth Writers' Prize, the NSW Premier's Christina Stead Award for Fiction, the Victorian Premier's Award for Fiction and the Aurealis Award for Best Science Fiction Novel, and have been widely translated. His short fiction has appeared in numerous literary magazines and collections, including Best Australian Stories, Best Australian Fantasy and Horror and The Penguin Century of Australian Stories, and has been shortlisted for the Aurealis Awards for Best Science Fiction Short Story and Best Horror Short Story.

As well as writing fiction and poetry, James writes and reviews for a wide range of Australian and international newspapers and magazines. In 2012 he won the Pascall Prize for Australia's Critic of the year.

Reviews

[matt · Rating 5 out of 5]

I started James Bradley’s Deep Water thinking it was a book about the oceans, I’m finishing with an extraordinary reminder of how interconnected we all are on this planet and an urgent call for new thinking on this incredible and vitally important environment. Essential read.

[Ali · Rating 5 out of 5]

Bradley almost fools you, in the early part of this excellent book, into thinking that this is going to be a series of science essays on oceanography and associated topics. Chapters on fish and sea mammals, currents and flows, are engaging and intriguing but seem largely stand-alone. A hint, however, comes when Bradley talks of the duality of swimming, "a sense in which we are simultaneously contained within our bodies and part of something far larger." And so, gradually, he warms us into a bigger, holistic story of what is happening to our planet and how both human activity and ecosystems cannot be seen as isolated or local systems.
The book is tremendously researched. I could quibble (and of course I am) about the lack of hyperlinking of the referenced sections in the ebook, but the references are clearly laid out for those who want to know more, and the breadth Bradley covers is staggering. From fish farming, to cobalt mining, to eco-shipping, plastics pollution, fish cognition, whale singing, turtle navigation, artic ice development and melt, human migration, krill lifecycles, deep sea trench worlds, coral bleaching and reef recovery and global supply chain evolution are all topics covered in depth and with thought. The book is such a delight to read, with easy, accessible prose and a wealth of curiousity-driven findings to share. The picture builds to a total view, a coherent story about what is indivisible, even as each corner has beauty to see in the detail as well as the whole.
What emerges is slightly terrifying, no matter how much warming up Bradley attempts to do. This is possibly the most comprehensive summary of what the Anthropocene actually looks like that I have read. And it isn't pretty. Because he focuses on systems, Bradley also highlights things that are hard to change. It is easier, for example, to build a "green" ship than to dismantle global manufacturing of disposable products which only a fraction of the world can afford. Still, Bradley highlights that there is little sustainability without the latter. He relentlessly reports the ever-worsening picture of temperature rise, ice melt, and tipping points that we never knew existed until we passed them.
This is not a sensationalist book, and Bradley is also careful to highlight the adaptability and resilience of both oceans and their inhabitants, and indeed of humans. From biologists breeding more heat-tolerant coral to cobalt recycling and the growing opposition to deep ocean mining, he paints a picture of many hues. And perhaps most importantly, his love of the ocean expressed through research and shared knowledge reminds us, as he concludes, "however much is lost, there is still more to save."

[Inga · Rating 5 out of 5]

A masterwork. Full of beauty and wonder - a fascinating exploration of other ways of being. This ecological history of the ocean is also the history of human intervention, a reckoning with the state of our watery planet - and with grief. Yet Deep Water offers something more: a map for the way forward, for hope.

[Monica Willyard Moen · Rating 2 out of 5]

I really wanted to enjoy this book, and I am so disappointed by it. When I worked in marketing, we were taught that the number one rule in marketing is never antagonize your customer. Even if it gets you some approval from people who don't like that customer, you end up losing more customers than you game. That's what happened with this book. Let me explain. I am the mother of a biracial child, and I have biracial grandchildren. My niece is biracial, and so are some of my second cousins. That is my point of view in addressing this issue.

I picked up this book from a deep and genuine curiosity about the ocean, it's inhabitants, it's geography, and lots of other things. I expected that to be the focus of the book. However, by the end of chapter 1, I knew that's not what I would be getting from this book because the author Makes several barbed comments about racism, patriarchy, and colonialists, along with insulting people who are politically conservative. If it were just in one chapter, I would gloss over it and move on. However, it is like a thread woven through the entire book. It is offputting to me, and it undermines whatever point the author was trying to make in this book.

If I wanted lectures on racism and patriarchy, I could turn on CNN or tune in and watch the women on the View. I could do the same if I wanted political rhetoric. I didn't want that. I wanted a book about the ocean. Yes, this book does talk about the ocean, but it also has this arrogant, superior attitude as if he is signaling to us that he has all the right beliefs and thoughts. That is very un appealing, and that is why I am rating this book so poorly.

I read this as an audiobook, and I do want to say that the narration was beautifully done. That part of things was done exceptionally well.

[Mick de Waart · Rating 3 out of 5]

Bradley sketches a sprawling world that interconnects the world’s oceans with everything from the universe and modern day slavery to geopolitics and the origins of life. It becomes abundantly clear that rather than lying at the edge of our world, the oceans are right in the middle. Every chapter, the author delves into different aspects of the world’s waters and he does so very well.

The book’s strength is unfortunately also its main weakness: its expansive scope. Its sprawling nature prevents Bradley from delivering one overarching story that threads everything together narrative-wise. As a result, the book sometimes feels more like a collection of separate stories and Bradley—in my opinion—fails to deliver more than the sum of the books parts. They’re really good parts though.

7/10

[Elentarri · Rating 2 out of 5]

I'm not sure what the intended objective of this book was supposed to be - other than doom porn. This book is a collection of chapters that read like magazine articles. Very little of the book's contents is new to me - it's essentially a rehash of old stuff. The writing style is serviceable, but nothing to wax eloquent about. Bradley has provided a shallow and one-dimensional, not to mention thoroughly depressing, combination of history; science; and the author's maudlin musings (I'm surprised Bradley even bothers to get up in the morning - he seems very depressed). For a fairly disjointed text, the only overarching theme is that the ocean is involved somewhere. So you have superficial chapters glancing at: the trans-oceanic slave trade and the spread of capitalism because that travelled over the ocean (no mention is made that the spread of ideas and slavery is perfectly well accomplished by wheels and feet); the history of swimming; migrations (mostly birds, but a few sea critters are mentioned); whales and the soundscape; finned intelligence; beaches and the deep; pollution; overfishing and piracy (not as exciting as it sounds); cargo shipping and containers (fairly interesting or at least new to me); coral reefs (suicidally depressing); krill and antarctic ice. I did find the Australian centric perspective of this book refreshing. However, despite the large reference section, this book comes across as a doom-and-gloom-might-as-well-give-up opinion piece, rather than any sort of vaguely objective analysis or overview of the world's ocean. A thoroughly disappointing book!

[caroline! · Rating 4 out of 5]

i enjoyed reading this immensely! it was a beautifully written treatise on the ocean, the anthropocene, and the brutal reality of the past, present, and (uncertain) future. i am very curious about bradley’s fiction works - the prose was a highlight for me.

as many of you know, i am a lover of the ocean. it makes me feel calm and excited and curious and also as small as a speck of dust whenever see it; the whales i want to spend my life studying inhabit it and it thus it has a great hold over me. deep water made me really think about the ocean and how it connects not only to bradley’s life experiences, but to my own. the blending of fields is truly admirable - oceanography, zoology, ecology, autobiography, anthropology, and history meld together through gorgeously constructed chapters into what can only be described as a masterwork, at once love letter and warning call for our ocean.

honestly, the only thing keeping this from five stars for me was really the tone. this is not a book to read if you easily freak out about the state of the world. while there were hopeful bits here and there, bradley and the scientists he references are a tad pessimistic - which, while entirely fair and justified by all the presented data, didn’t leave me feeling exactly the way i wanted to when reading a book about one of my favorite things in all the world. also some of the chapters were highly history- or economics-focused, which just didn’t hold my interest as well as others.

[Meredith · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book started off being a wondrous look at life in the oceans and ended up being an endless scolding and nagging about climate change and modern life, with no real solutions presented. Shaming everyone for the global supply chain is not particularly helpful or realistic, even if it does negatively impact marine life and habitats. After about the first half or two thirds, I just couldn’t wait for this to be over. Still, there were some powerful concepts in early chapters that were presented simply on the face of their science. I will hang onto those as positive takeaways.

[Ashley Person · Rating 4 out of 5]

"the ocean is alive with meaning; to listen to it is to be made aware of the intensity, complexity, and impossible beauty of the world. but it is also to recognise that we are not separate from that world, and to think that we are is to do violence not just to it, but to ourselves."

the ocean is intertwined with human life. the ongoing climate crisis is affecting every aspect of our lives. there are communities whose whole lives depend on the sustainability of the resources the water gives and will give in the future.

nuclear power. deforestation. colonialism. oil. forest fires. over-fishing. mining. mass consumption & shipping via sea. mass coral bleaching. animal extinction. underpaid worker exploitation.

this book covers not only the interpersonal relationships people have with bodies of water, but also just how important the ocean(s) are to every aspect of our lives. we take a lot for granted.

-"...I am suddenly and forcibly aware of my own implication in this catastrophe, of the fact that almost every object I touch or use- my razor, my car, the soles in my shoes- is part of the same unending torrent of refuse that is choking the planet"

very good mix of scientific research and personal experiences. the author is incredibly well researched while still being funny and relatable. hopeful, upsetting, & informed.

[Luke · Rating 4 out of 5]

The ice is the memory of the world.

There was a time in my life when reading was what I voraciously coveted, stingily spent, and hoarded deep. These days, everything is moving faster: work, world, "well" being, each an implicit argument to actually, do judge that book by its cover. And so I picked this up on my increasingly normal two hour library round trips: seduced by the darkly scintillating ocean life, but also somewhat curious, for the first time in a while, what all those write to publish scientist/scientist adjacent types had been up to the last quarter century, as well as mindful of the times. For as I write, the land to the south burns, the land to the north freezes, and my own square of turf eyes the floodline as the new year progresses, shepherded in by two years previous seasons in which the weather and the waters convulsed, the peninsula threatened to become an island, and I lost power for three days.

[T]he liberation of world markets, a process powered by the liberation of unprecedented amounts of fossil fuels from the earth, has dramatically sped up the same process that is liberating Arctic ice from existence.

-Naomi Klein, This Changes Everything

As the sociologist and theorist of time Barbara Adam has observed, abstract time is a 'central part of the deep structure of environmental damage wrought by the industrial way of life'.

Bradley takes up this time of Lear, sets it upon the waves, drives it forth and pins it down. Depending on your tempermaent, he may give you every intersectional science lesson you've ever wanted, or you'll eye the incoming Turtle Island "inauguration" with gratefulness that there will be even less barrier to the banning(/burning) of books. Me, I view the facts with interests and the scenarios with credibility, while I found the sociopolitical theories useful only when not myopically thrust or paradoxically cohabitation with calls for an even more 'roided international police force. True, my viewpoint is skewed, as it's difficult to dread the promised ten inches of sea rise by 2050 when I newly have an 80% chance of making it to 2040. Indeed, it was Bradley's closing out his narrative with his mother's passing from cancer that lost his exuberant castigation of the capital and imperial in the midst of his Plantationcene that fifth star (especially when such didn't preclude the usual pointed fingers at the ever guileful China, fresh as a newborn from historical context and ten times as slippery).

During the civil war in the 1990s, foreign fisheries swept in and pillaged Somalia's waters, driving fish populations to the brink of collapse and destroying the marine environment by trawling in sensitive areas. Unable to feed their families, some Somali fishers started pirating Indian fishing boats and quickly escalated to attacks on cargo and other vessels. 'So one of the contributing factors to that whole maritime security challenge was fishermen who could no longer feed their families or pay for their livelihoods.'

For all that, I say that this is a good book in terms of what it offers in terms of concrete facts, ongoing endeavors, measured predictions, and, yes: commitment in terms of responsibilities taken and intersectionalities acknowledged. As the frequency of slavery can be correlated to corporate devastation of Global South fishing territories, so to can the abuse of the ocean be correlated to the sickness of those funny vertically-spined types trawling its waters, and while it was shocking to witness just how choked off today's ecosystems are compared to a mere two centuries ago, it makes sense to me that the enslavement and genocide on land was more than mirrored by the devastation wrought beneath the waves. As Bradley says in one form or another, we are all but certainly past the point of no return.

In May 1942 [the Cocos Islands] were a backdrop to [...] when a group of Ceylonese soldiers mutinied and attempted to hand the islands over to the Japanese. Their leader, Gratien Fernando, a Sinhalese Marxist who had signed up to fight fascism, saw the action as a way of resisting British colonial power. [...] Fernando's final words were 'Loyalty to a country under the heel of a White man is disloyalty.

In some hour of some day of some year, the pristine beach that encompasses the pride and joy of my workplace's city will sink beneath the waters, and many a multi million dollar landholding will lose its insurance, then its property value, then its moorings. Where I will be then remains to be seen, but for all my health issues, I have more confidence in my work as a union steward than I do in that of mayor or a director or a council member. For if there's one thing this book proves, it's that climate change is matter of all, and to deny such is to drown. In that regard, Baldwin may have been off the mark in pronouncing the fire next time, but I have no doubt that, whatever comes, the world and its life will survive, one way or another. I'd prefer that humans be part of that equation, but that judgment is still pending on many an instance. For when the fires down south have run through and those who thought themselves inviolate pick through the smoldering embers, we will see if they run and hide from the make and measure of their reckoning, or at last join hands with others to face it.

It is not knowledge we lack. It is the courage to understand what we know and draw conclusions.

-Sven Lindqvist, "Exterminate All the Brutes"

The imbalances and processes of capitalist accumulation that have driven the planet to its current predicament were not inevitable and are not unchangeable. And neither is the course from here.

[Peter Tillman]

One of Nature's periodic five best books list:
https://www.nature.com/articles/d4158...

Wait & see.

[Ginny · Rating 5 out of 5]

This beautiful, heart wrenching exploration of our oceans across time was the single most powerful work of science communication I have ever come across. I spent so much time with this book because every chapter left me completely in awe, and utterly enraged. Bradley does not pull any punches when describing the horrifying effects of human-induced climate change, pulling from experts across dozens of fields and backgrounds to illustrate just how all-consuming ecological destruction has been. This was also one of the few works I have read which highlights the inherent ties between climate change, colonialism, and slavery as a through line, relating each section back to it's roots in the extractionist practices of capitalism.

[Juliet Huneke · Rating 3 out of 5]

was listening to this audiobook for actually NINE MONTHS lol. i think i would’ve liked it more as a physical book even though usually i prefer listening to nonfiction, it was just kinda hard for me to keep up with the train of thought when i was listening. was really interested in how it’s about the connections between the ocean colonialism and other human systems of oppression like that’s so interesting so maybe i’ll give it a physical read eventually

[Rozanna Lilley · Rating 4 out of 5]

On the back cover, this book is described as 'a hymn to the beauty, mystery and wonder of the ocean'. In fact, it is an incredibly depressing read, documenting, in vivid and varied detail, human destruction of our planet. Despite a nod in the final pages to an open future, the general tone is bleak not joyous. And fair enough - we only have to watch the news to see the havoc being wreaked by climate change around the planet and, for those of us over 60, to feel somewhat relieved that we may miss the worst of it. This is an ambitious piece of scholarship - Bradley takes the reader through layers of deep time, to the formation of the earth, to the more recent past, connecting the violent processes of colonialism to rising seas levels. Certainly there is beauty - a melodic discussion of whale song; an excursion into the capacities of sea creatures - their intelligence and self-awareness dissolving the boundary between 'us' and 'them'. But there is also deep sea mining, the gluttony of gigantic trawlers, the melting ice, the growing layers of plastic that make up the ocean and our bodies. The book veers between reportage and philosophy; between hope and despair. It is a very impressive work and a call to environmental arms that should be read by everyone with an interest in the future of the planet - and isn't that all of us?

[Laney · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book was a history lesson on how colonialism and industrialism has (and still is) destroying our ocean and disrespecting indigenous life. It was hard to read, not going to lie. This was not the light hearted and hopeful book about sea creatures I thought it was lmfao.

To be fair, the author argues, “it is also a kind of violence for by denying the reality of what is going on we do violence to ourselves, by cauterizing our capacity for empathy and grief.” That quote was powerful and helped a new understanding settle in. “To bear witness in this way is to make ourselves vulnerable, to open ourselves up to loss and sadness.” I will say, I think it’s important to lift up our generation with more emphasis on the positive reminder that “the world still hums with beauty and astonishment” and that we’re all interconnected. People respond to that more and I wish there was more of that emphasized in the text.

But this book wasn’t written to make the public feel good…it was a call to action and a thought provoking collection of examples of marine destruction. I’m not supposed to be comfortable when we’re talking about violence. It’s also not about me or my own comfort; life is so much bigger than me or even humanity as a whole….a majority of this world is ocean!

[Marina · Rating 5 out of 5]

I’ve learnt more from this book about how our world works than from any other I’ve read in the last 5 years.

Essential reading for anyone who participates in our economic and political system.

[Tahnee Mason · Rating 1 out of 5]

What I wanted: an informative book about the ocean

What I got: yelled at by a man who knows everything

[Rachel · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5. I wish I could befriend all the nature writers I’ve read this year, and get together biannually or so, and chat about the ocean, the mountains, the underground, deep space, deep time, the deep future, and all the humans, both individual and specific, and generally vast, that pass between and through these liquid zones. Well, I would probably mostly be listening, and knowing me, crying, amid the lyricism of Rachel Carson, the dry precision of Jon Krakauer, and the depth of poesis and love imbued in Robert Macfarlane, Robin Wall Kimmerer, Annie Dillard, and now James Bradley. This gathering would be incomplete without Ben Goldfarb, Adam Nicolson, Helen Czerski, Sy Montgomery, Patty Krawec, Gloria Dickey, and Dan Flores, who have made my life so rich this year. Like these authors, Bradley deftly situates this work in the context of colonialism, exploitation, hierarchy of beneficence, racism, white supremacy, and capitalism as the churning machine that had given rise to the Anthropocene, painting a truly harrowing portrait of the current visage of our planet and our encroaching fate. It makes me genuinely balk, flinch, contemplate driving my car into a concrete slab (which would also probably be bad for the earth). I learned much about the ocean but I learned much more about the absolute emergency that is our climate moment and future, and while Bradley was kind enough to leave us with a call to hope, I honestly feel mostly bereft.

[Madeleine · Rating 5 out of 5]

Gorgeously written, well-researched but never remotely dry (hahaha get it), this is how non-fiction's done. You can almost tell James Bradley has written fiction too, just in the way this flows. Anyway, I love the ocean; I'm a little afraid of it; I love boats; I hate fish; I'm scared about climate change and sad about the exploitation and destruction of the oceans and the earth. This book treats a wide range of topics and treats them with wonder and fascination, and I learned a lot. From krill to shipping, whalesong to dying reefs, ecological disasters to the history of capitalism and industrialisation and slavery all the way to the theologian Digby's 1587 treatise, De Arte Natandi (On the art of swimming), this book has it all.

So there's a lot of sadness in it, and just a dash of hope that whatever we have lost, "there's more to save".

[Zeta9991 · Rating 4 out of 5]

L'ho finito quasi per sbaglio perché la versione digitale indicava che ero ancora all'80%, ma non avevo calcolato i ringraziamenti, la bibliografia etc... e quindi niente è finito. Che dire? è stata una lettura impegnativa, ma illuminante sotto molti punti di vista. Non mi ero mai effettivamente resa conto di quante cose accadano nel mare e di quanto siano affascinanti gli esseri che lo abitano. Quello che rimane da questo libro è davvero una visione d'insieme di quanto il nostro ambiente, il nostro mondo è quello marino siano interconnessi in modi insospettabili.
Solo per fare un esempio, non avevo mai pensato che i sonar delle imbarcazioni o i rumori delle strumentazioni umane potessero infastidire o addirittura uccidere alcune specie di balene!
Ci sono tante cose di cui come individui e come società non siamo consapevoli e che fanno una grande differenza, soprattutto quando si tratta di interi ecosistemi lontani da noi, come quelli marini.
Insomma questo libro mi ha sicuramente aiutata a capire quanto poco so del mare e quanto affascinante invece sia.

[Samvardhan Vishnoi · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is amazing, heartfelt, and urgent

[Gabriel Thomas · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fantastic book with the perfect balance of optimism, caution, technicality, emotion, passion and story telling

[Alex Moore · Rating 4 out of 5]

We’re killing the ocean and i am depressed

[Kerryn Lawson · Rating 5 out of 5]

I listened to the audiobook.

Having read a couple of James Bradley’s fiction books I can see his passion for our environment in each of those books. I was both fascinated, amazed and disheartened reading this book. Our oceans and the creatures that inhabit them are in finely fascinating. But it was also heartbreaking to think about the damage we have done and continue to do to our oceans. I take the side of hope that we can do better, we have to, if we want to leave a legacy and a world for the generations to come.

[James Whitmore · Rating 5 out of 5]

How do you tell a story as big as the ocean? Herman Melville needed over 200,000 words, and that was just whales. James Bradley manages to go deeper and further in this nimble and intimate account of the thing that makes Earth the blue planet. It is of course not a complete account of the ocean. Singular, because truly all the oceans are connected, but also because ocean is a singular idea, one that has provoked and tempted presumably since people first laid eyes on it (which, Bradley notes, was at least before a million years ago when our Homo erectus cousin-ancestors made crossings to islands). Read more on my blog.

[D · Rating 2 out of 5]

Book is less about the ocean and more of a rambling string of anthropological vignettes and theories about population movements. Too much time is devoted to fringe theories, not ocean related. The natural histories are fascinating and well written but more recent human histories I found poorly phrased and researched. Source material is questionable and in some areas, it is obvious no source was found. For example, Western Africa is summarized as if it was one big country and the people there all the same. This is frustrating, especially to readers who thought they borrowed a book on the oceans. At least libraries have free returns.

[Luísa Andrade · Rating 5 out of 5]

Deep Water é uma travessia pelas camadas do oceano - e pelas falhas que afundam a humanidade. Bradley entrelaça ciência, história natural, filosofia e memória para escrever o mar como corpo, linguagem e luto. Não é só sobre recifes ou colapso climático. É sobre colonização, trauma, desejo, tempo profundo. Um ensaio radicalmente interdisciplinar que pensa com as águas e nos obriga a encarar o que estamos prestes a perder.

[Cheryl · Rating 4 out of 5]

Out beyond the break, as the swell moved beneath me, slow and steady as breath, it was sometimes possible to feel the intimation of something larger, a sense of time’s depth, of the great pulse of the world’s cycles. And although it was never easy to articulate, it often seemed that something transformative inhered in those moments – as if to give oneself over to the ocean’s largeness and the movement of the wind and the waves might offer a glimpse of another way of being.

Scientists have found evidence that such feelings of expansive awareness have a neurological origin, associated with the interplay between the neural network our brain uses when focusing on the external world and the network that governs internal processes relating to self-reflection, self-awareness and emotion.

Anyone that quotes the American indigenous and Latinx poet Natalie Diaz and includes a photo of the drawings from the Cave of Swimmers in Egypt from 10,000 years ago promises to deliver a rich and varied offering of writings on the ocean, and it didn’t disappoint. I love water, call myself a hydrophilic girl, and this book covered so much of the history of the waters on our earth.

In 2016 scientists at the Paranal Observatory in Atacama, Chile, observed the chemical signature of water in a galaxy 12.88 billion light years from Earth, the light from which began travelling towards us less than a billion years after the Big Bang. And water is still being made today: in the immense stellar nursery of the Orion Nebula, enough is created every day to fill Earth’s oceans sixty times over.

Studies consistently demonstrate proximity to water, or even just the colour blue, reduces anxiety and improves psychological wellbeing. And while at some point in our evolutionary history humans and most primates lost the innate ability to swim that most other mammals possess, our bodies remember the water in other ways: simply submerging our faces immediately triggers a series of hard-wired responses, our heart slowing as it shunts blood away from the extremities to our core to preserve oxygen and protect crucial organs.

There is something remarkably poetic about the idea of the tides as a wave flowing around the Earth, breaking and dividing and feeding back into itself, day after day, year after year, century after century, backwards and forwards through time.

The ocean is not trackless or unknowable. Instead, as I am reminded every time I enter its waters, it is a living space, where the great cycles of the planet – the movement of the tides and currents, the motion of the wind and cloud, the arrival and disappearance of animals across days and seasons – intertwine with the busy life of the immediate, the suck and pull of the kelp in the surge of the waves, the shimmering movement of the fish, the cries of the gulls and the dive-bombing terns. Understood in this way, water’s mutability becomes a way of imagining and even inhabiting different ways of being, of acknowledging the intermingling of our bodies and lives with both planetary systems and the intimate, microscopic life that surrounds and permeates us

The salt that fills the oceans also began forming during this period, as rain saturated with carbonic acid dissolved the newly formed rocks of the surface, leaching away minerals and washing them out to sea. In time this process slowed and stabilised at a saltiness of about thirty-five parts per million – about the same as today – but not before it had transported so much salt into the oceans that if it was dried out it would cover the entire Earth in a layer 50 metres thick.

For these Pacific cultures their islands were not isolated outcrops in a vastness of ocean; instead they were what the historian Thomas Gladwin describes as a ‘constellation linked together by pathways on the ocean’, or to use Tongan and Fijian anthropoligist and writer Epeli Hau’ofa’s eloquent formulation, ‘a sea of islands’, in which ‘peoples and cultures moved and mingled’. Encoded in these systems of navigation and exchange was a way of being in the world that was not grounded in the top-down abstraction of charts and maps but conceived of as a system of relationships in which embodied knowledge and experience take precedence. Something similar is true of the shift in understanding involved in seeing the world through the lens of the ocean: no longer is it possible to understand the development of societies in isolation. Instead the map dissolves and reforms to reveal the fluid patterns of migration and exchange that connect human societies across time and space. It also demands a recognition of the complex interplay between human activity and the environment – the way we are shaped by the world around us as much as it is shaped by us.

[Rachel Snyder Miller · Rating 5 out of 5]

This series of essays was part biology and anthropology courses, part memoir, and part philosophy. And it was a wonder. This read is a serious contender for book of the year. Bradley travels the world: from the plastic-ridden Cocos Islands to Antarctica’s krill researchers.

Bradley takes us on a journey from creation through old time to the warming waters of today. He takes on the “inkling of infinity” that is our Earth’s ocean, the impossible depths and worlds we continue to uncover. The act of swimming into the ocean, Bradley posits, is to understand a duality, that we are both contained within our bodies and also part of something much larger, “When we swim our bodies become part of the tidal flow and movement of water, the great pulse of the planet’s systems, the act of giving ourselves over to their rhythms, a form of communion, of embodied connectedness.”

I learned so much about the movement and vast life in the ocean. From the diel vertical migration (which is the single largest movement of life on Earth. And it happens every night!) to how vital Antarctic krill are to the survival of their ecosystem and our world.

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“We are connected to that deep future, just as we are connected to the deep past.”

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Bradley also had so much to teach me about the impact on our modern world by our commoditization of this seemingly infinite resource:
- The impact of sugar on global trading systems, as a business built on the backs of enslaved laborers and with incredibly harmful ecological impacts on farming land,
- The anthropological effect of slave trade on national economies (both crafting the bedrock of economies such as that of the American South and devastating the economies of West African nations through colonial extraction in ways these national have yet to recover from),
- The advent of the shipping container and how it transformed international maritime trade, while also speedily becoming a dangerous emissions sector, and
- The effects of illegal and underreported fishing in the Pacific by world powers on local communities that depend on this livelihood from Ecuador and Chile to Sierra Leone and Ghana.

Bradley contends that this Western way of being and dominating the ocean is in direct contrast to the indigenous cultures, such as the seafaring, nomadic Pacific Islanders who read stars, sky, waves, and currents better than any map and the Australian Queensland people’s ceremonies tied to the annual arrival of the humpback whale. The author travels to the Cocos Islands and works with survey teams to understand the impacts of plastic on beaches in the middle of nowhere that are overrun by plastic. And it is not simply beaches that are being impacted by human industry, there are troubling truths in the deep-sea mining techniques of blasting the sea floor on the search for critical minerals (e.g., nickel, cobalt, copper, and manganese) and the destruction of reefs and ocean floor ecosystems by industry-scale fishing trawlers.

I’ll let Bradley give the best advice to those feeling paralyzed with anxiety in a rapidly changing world:

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“To bear witness in this way is to make ourselves vulnerable, to open ourselves up to the loss and sadness around us…This act of openness creates the possibility of love and joy and—improbably—wonder…and I have realised that however much has been lost, the world still hums with beauty and astonishment.

We share the planet with whales that sing across oceans and navigate by watching the stars, with fish that pass ways of knowing across generations, in webs of culture spreading back millions of years, with turtles that follow invisible patterns of magnetism back to the beaches where they were born.

To contemplate the strangeness and wonder of these other ways of being is to begin to understand our place in the world very differently, to be reminded that we are not separate, or different, but part of a much larger system of impossible magnificence and complexity.”

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May we uncover that wonder and that sense of our small part to play, all while grieving the depths of the destruction we have wrecked upon our planet home.

[Alex Rogers · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was blown away by this book. My expectation was a book on ocean life (always a good thing) but instead I got a meticulously researched and incredibly detailed portrait of the Anthropocene, seen through the lens of the ocean. Bradley uses the ocean as a theme, a binding and all encompassing medium he uses to show how we are irrevocably changing the the world. Its as much a devastating critique of unfettered & rampant capitalist / neoliberalism as it is a nature book. The nature is there, in all its complexity and glory, and his love of the sea and knowledge of its intricacies, power and beauty is obvious. But he makes it clear how close the ocean is to the brink, and how little capacity is left to absorb the abuse we've been meting out to the planet.

While central to the book (and to our planet), he uses the ocean as a device, introducing various oceanic chapters or themes to then explore the broader problem. "Beaches" leads to plastic waste on remote atoll beaches, "Echo" to meditations on whale-song and cetacean intelligence and the devastating clamor of seismic exploration. "Net" leads to industrial overfishing, and "Cargo" to globalisation, international trade, cargo ships and heavy fuel oil emissions. If it sounds grim, it is, and its clear how much we've lost, and how much is on the brink of devastation that if we are lucky, will take generations to repair, if its possible at all.

It couldn't be more topical - I read "Reef" on the devastating bleaching of coral around the world, while simultaneously reading newspaper accounts of a scientist at the Heron Island coral research station leaving the island in tears, never to return, as the reef there is so damaged from bleaching, and is likely to die in its entirety. It feels very personal to me. At 25 I left my home country to come to Australia, with a dream of diving on the Great Barrier Reef corals, which I did, achieving a lifetime dream. Since then I've dived there several times, including at Heron Island, and marveled at the unbelievable intensity, complexity and shocking beauty of that ecosystem, so well described by Bradley. To have it all gone, within my lifetime, is devastating, and scarcely believable - except I've been reading the scientist's warnings (and the politician's mealy-mouthed refusal to engage in meaningful solutions) for decades, so I believe it. And what a sense of shame and sorrow I feel, that I cannot take my own children there to show them these wonders beyond compare.

So what can we do to make a difference, to fight the good fight, to save a little of what is left, and stop the collapse of nature and human society? The answer is different for all of us - but Bradley's masterwork here seems to be his personal answer to that question, and an excellent and compelling read. Buy it.