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Book Review
| Fathoming the Ocean: The Discovery and Exploration of the Deep Sea. By Helen M. Rozwadowski. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005. xv + 276 pp. Illustrations, notes, index. $29.95.
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| To help establish a viable "land ethic," Aldo Leopold, in Sand County Almanac, called on historians to study the past relationship between humans and the natural world. While environmental historians have striven to answer Leopold's call, they have largely ignored the world's oceans. Environmental history has been, by and large, terrestrial history. Carl Safina recently suggested that a concomitant "sea ethic" is now required, one that likewise must rest on an awareness of the ocean's history, one intricately linked to the human experience. Fathoming the Ocean examines a crucial period in Anglo-American history when the ocean became culturally, politically, and economically significant. It explores how scientists and sailors in the mid-nineteenth century perceived, interacted with, and placed value on the ocean as a place of work, as a place of leisure, and significantly, as a place of scientific study. Bridging environmental history and the history of science and technology, Rozwadowski traces the transformation of the ocean from an empty and seemingly dangerous void in the 1830s to a place amenable to understanding and control by the 1880s. |
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The unprecedented interest in the world's oceans in mid-century was in equal parts commercial, political, scientific, and cultural. Rozwadowski establishes the Anglo-American fascination with the sea through an examination of the rise of yachting, the increasing popularity of trans-Atlantic travel, the crazes for marine natural history and home aquaria, and the avid readership for the new genre of maritime novels. She then describes how the first systematic attempt to sound the ocean floor was spurred largely by the fishing industries, especially whaling, and by the enormous increase in British and American shipping that accompanied industrialization. Scientific study of the ocean was intimately linked with the ocean's growing cultural and economic significance. Scientists like Matthew Fontaine Maury, whose Physical Geography of the Sea (Dover, 2003) set the foundation for the systematic study of the ocean's depths, worked closely with whalers and sea captains, while writers like Jules Verne crafted fictions based on Maury's text. The Challenger expedition, likewise, though often hailed as the foundation of oceanography, is in Rozwadowski's narrative, the culmination of half a century of "questions, practices, and traditions of ocean investigation" (p. 168). Rather than placing emphasis on a specific voyage, Rozwadowski focuses on the gradual solidification of a work culture at sea as the main force contributing to the emergence of oceanography as a discipline. |
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The world's brimming blue waters hold most of the life on Earth, and regulate both the world's climate and its weather. As the last unexplored region of our globe, the oceans will only become more important as we travel into the next century. And only by viewing the ocean as a place with a history, one imbued with political, economic, and cultural significance, will we be able to make sense of today's environmental problems. Fathoming the Ocean helps extend the well-established land ethic to the sea, and will be required reading for all those interested in the environmental history of our planet. |
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Michael S. Reidy is an assistant professor in the Department of History and Philosophy at Montana State University. He is co-author of Communicating Science: the Scientific Journal Article from the 17th Century to the Present (Oxford, 2000) and author of Tides of History: Organizing the Ocean and Creating the Scientist (Chicago, forthcoming). |
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