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Beyond Extinction: The Eternal Ocean—Climate Change the Continuity of Life
The ocean is the womb of all life on earth. It is beautiful and bizarre, violent and mysterious. Inhabited by a cast of characters stolen from fantasy, it’s a dystopian world where dragons are real, and monsters are commonplace. Today's spectacular marine life has an ancient history preserved in stone - fossil strata that read like dramatic pages from the longest story ever told - tales of evolution, extinction, and surprising continuity. Having thrived a tumultuous 500 million years, this marine kingdom is now challenged by a new, arrogant and domineering life form. This book looks beyond the media focus on climate change and extinction to celebrate the continuity of ocean life. I’ll take you on a personal journey to explore origins and destinies, from primordial soup to today’s threatened oceans - towards a future we can influence. We always have a choice.
224 pages, Hardcover
Published July 1, 2019
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
May 10, 2021
As a record of the history and incredible diversity of ocean life, this book is fantastic. It is what it appears to be: a textbook. But it overreaches. And to explain, let me talk about something that seems to have nothing at all to do with the topic at hand: baseball.
I grew up in New England. By conventional standards (and admittedly I have other teams I follow with reasonably comparable passion) that meant I was going to be a fan of the Boston Red Sox. Now, as anyone who knows anything about baseball, and the Red Sox in particular, as we head into the 2020 season there are two things that happened in the postseason that immediately concern fans. One is the loss of beloved homegrown superstar Mookie Betts. The team decided it had to trade him to free up money that would have otherwise been tied up in his considerable (and obviously well-earned) salary. The other is that manager Alex Cora was also let go. This one has less to do with Cora’s relationship with the Red Sox and more the revelation that he was tied up in the recent scandal involving the Houston Astros.
Now, fans are currently more interested in Betts’ loss than they are Cora’s. If you know anything about Red Sox fans, they always have passionate conversations, and normally negative ones, about the state of their favorite team. It can be reasonably assumed, based on my experience, despite not currently following this conversation, that they expect this to be “a rebuilding year,” or in other words, don’t expect a World Series title in November.
And probably, we won’t get one, but anything’s possible. We proved that, or so I’d like to believe, in the historic 2004 season (coincidentally chronicled as it happened in a book co-authored by Stephen King, Faithful), and in the several additional championships won over the past fifteen years. At this point the Red Sox have a better modern record than the Yankees (trust me, this is significant, though of course Red Sox fans still don’t appreciate it).
This is to say, even though we lost Betts and tapped a seemingly unimpressive interim replacement for Cora, we still have an intangible that must always be taken into account: a mastery of big market moneyball.
The whole concept of moneyball (there’s a book about that, too, and a Brad Pitt movie based on it) is leveraging basically invisible talent to achieve greater success than you would expect from a team stacked with visible talent. The latter has consistently won World Series, too, make no mistake about it, but the invisible approach (usually punctuated by a few visible talents) has just as consistently won them, too, and no team today has mastered that art better than the Red Sox.
And again, even Red Sox management doesn’t always seem to appreciate this fact. Just as soon as one of these squads has won a World Series, it gets dynamited to make room for the next unlikely combination. And so while the Yankees remain reliably consistent, and just as reliably remain incapable of reclaiming their traditional World Series success, the Red Sox go through feast-and-famine, and collect World Series titles.
This book, Beyond Extinction, if it were a fan of baseball, wouldn’t understand any of that. It would be the Red Sox fans fixating on the loss of Mookie Betts. Its basic conclusion is that in the grand scheme of things, humans, and that big apparent threat to their continued viability, climate change, are no big deal. So: we shouldn’t worry, because we basically have it coming. We’re too stupid.
Coming from New England, again, I’ve seen parts of this argument made and refuted. New England was home to a vast network of mills that horribly polluted our rivers. The mills, today, no longer exist, and the waters are fine. (Manufacturing was exported in all the great and terrible logic that was a part of what made this happen, but don’t worry about that.) The results of the horribly polluted rivers were the kind of stories you can see in The Simpsons, with Blinky the three-eyed fish, mutated by Springfield’s nuclear power plant. We had three-eyed fish. We couldn’t go fishing in those waters.
And this is the kind of book that reflects resiliency and can’t understand it. Remember all those nuclear bomb tests? Apparently the environment bounced back from those. And humans are actually remarkably adaptable, too. We go where it doesn’t make sense for us to go. We live in places that are prone to disaster. But don’t take my word for it: One of the results of climate change is rising ocean levels. You would expect people alarmed by this fact to back away from land impacted by this. But an inconvenient truth is that, yes, Al Gore has plenty of beachfront property.
We live in a world that’s incredibly small, insofar as the human population is bigger than ever before. And we don’t know what to think about that. Literally the biggest film blockbuster of recent times revolves around a bad guy who thought he could solve the problem by a massive reduction of the population. But the thing is, in the real world, that’s exactly the thinking of people who in all innocence consider themselves the good guys. They look around and can only consider change in telling other people what they can’t do. Which of course is what humans have been doing throughout recorded history, and just as typically end up opposed by other people with a different set of objections, and...
So I read something like this, which is reflected in every major scientific thought process, and I wonder...Wouldn’t it be much simpler to, I don’t know, be a fan of the Brewers? Some ideas are just too big for us to grasp. And we prove it in ways we can’t even begin to understand.
That is all.
I grew up in New England. By conventional standards (and admittedly I have other teams I follow with reasonably comparable passion) that meant I was going to be a fan of the Boston Red Sox. Now, as anyone who knows anything about baseball, and the Red Sox in particular, as we head into the 2020 season there are two things that happened in the postseason that immediately concern fans. One is the loss of beloved homegrown superstar Mookie Betts. The team decided it had to trade him to free up money that would have otherwise been tied up in his considerable (and obviously well-earned) salary. The other is that manager Alex Cora was also let go. This one has less to do with Cora’s relationship with the Red Sox and more the revelation that he was tied up in the recent scandal involving the Houston Astros.
Now, fans are currently more interested in Betts’ loss than they are Cora’s. If you know anything about Red Sox fans, they always have passionate conversations, and normally negative ones, about the state of their favorite team. It can be reasonably assumed, based on my experience, despite not currently following this conversation, that they expect this to be “a rebuilding year,” or in other words, don’t expect a World Series title in November.
And probably, we won’t get one, but anything’s possible. We proved that, or so I’d like to believe, in the historic 2004 season (coincidentally chronicled as it happened in a book co-authored by Stephen King, Faithful), and in the several additional championships won over the past fifteen years. At this point the Red Sox have a better modern record than the Yankees (trust me, this is significant, though of course Red Sox fans still don’t appreciate it).
This is to say, even though we lost Betts and tapped a seemingly unimpressive interim replacement for Cora, we still have an intangible that must always be taken into account: a mastery of big market moneyball.
The whole concept of moneyball (there’s a book about that, too, and a Brad Pitt movie based on it) is leveraging basically invisible talent to achieve greater success than you would expect from a team stacked with visible talent. The latter has consistently won World Series, too, make no mistake about it, but the invisible approach (usually punctuated by a few visible talents) has just as consistently won them, too, and no team today has mastered that art better than the Red Sox.
And again, even Red Sox management doesn’t always seem to appreciate this fact. Just as soon as one of these squads has won a World Series, it gets dynamited to make room for the next unlikely combination. And so while the Yankees remain reliably consistent, and just as reliably remain incapable of reclaiming their traditional World Series success, the Red Sox go through feast-and-famine, and collect World Series titles.
This book, Beyond Extinction, if it were a fan of baseball, wouldn’t understand any of that. It would be the Red Sox fans fixating on the loss of Mookie Betts. Its basic conclusion is that in the grand scheme of things, humans, and that big apparent threat to their continued viability, climate change, are no big deal. So: we shouldn’t worry, because we basically have it coming. We’re too stupid.
Coming from New England, again, I’ve seen parts of this argument made and refuted. New England was home to a vast network of mills that horribly polluted our rivers. The mills, today, no longer exist, and the waters are fine. (Manufacturing was exported in all the great and terrible logic that was a part of what made this happen, but don’t worry about that.) The results of the horribly polluted rivers were the kind of stories you can see in The Simpsons, with Blinky the three-eyed fish, mutated by Springfield’s nuclear power plant. We had three-eyed fish. We couldn’t go fishing in those waters.
And this is the kind of book that reflects resiliency and can’t understand it. Remember all those nuclear bomb tests? Apparently the environment bounced back from those. And humans are actually remarkably adaptable, too. We go where it doesn’t make sense for us to go. We live in places that are prone to disaster. But don’t take my word for it: One of the results of climate change is rising ocean levels. You would expect people alarmed by this fact to back away from land impacted by this. But an inconvenient truth is that, yes, Al Gore has plenty of beachfront property.
We live in a world that’s incredibly small, insofar as the human population is bigger than ever before. And we don’t know what to think about that. Literally the biggest film blockbuster of recent times revolves around a bad guy who thought he could solve the problem by a massive reduction of the population. But the thing is, in the real world, that’s exactly the thinking of people who in all innocence consider themselves the good guys. They look around and can only consider change in telling other people what they can’t do. Which of course is what humans have been doing throughout recorded history, and just as typically end up opposed by other people with a different set of objections, and...
So I read something like this, which is reflected in every major scientific thought process, and I wonder...Wouldn’t it be much simpler to, I don’t know, be a fan of the Brewers? Some ideas are just too big for us to grasp. And we prove it in ways we can’t even begin to understand.
That is all.
March 6, 2020
Beyond Extinction: The Eternal Ocean by Wolfgang Grulke is an extraordinary book. Full of bright colorful images that cover the discussed material. The ocean is so vast and has been around for the longest time. This body of water houses so many living organisms that are crucial for other life forms. Ocean life is so vast and interesting. We need to keep our oceans clean, to protect its wildlife.
I received this copy from the publisher. This is my voluntary review.
I received this copy from the publisher. This is my voluntary review.
July 28, 2021
This book looks like it wants to be a coffee-table feature, but it reads like a textbook. The pictures and graphics are amazing, and the information is also thoroughly fascinating. I actually felt like I learned something when I was finished. However, the size of the book really was off-putting. Either it wants to be a coffee-table book that we can thumb through leisurely or it wants to be a text book. It needs to make up its mind.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews