Sustaining Seas

Reviews / Votes

This vital volume describes a volume - the oceans - whose suffering sea-changes today require novel modes of governing, breathing, eating, timekeeping, building, and being. The book's store of essays provides much needed equipment for re-orienting maritime and marine writing, thinking, and acting in these, our unsustainable times. -- Stefan Helmreich, Elting E. Morison Professor of Anthropology, MIT Sustaining Seas is an interdisciplinary homage to the ocean. The collection shows that oceans not only deserve our care in the face of myriad threats such as overfishing and pollution, but they provide the possibility for care, as they sustain all life. About much more than crisis, this hopeful collection provides fresh perspective on our embodied relationships with the seas. -- Becky Mansfield, Professor of Geography, The Ohio State University Splashing widely through the arts, humanities, sciences, and social sciences, Sustaining Seas shows why the ocean needs to be at the heart of our thinking now. The overlapping and sometimes competing perspectives offered by landscape architecture, anthropology, literary criticism, environmental studies, the arts, and critical theory, among others, together produce an urgent diagnosis of the sickness in our blue planet, as well as practical and imaginative responses to it. Readers and thinkers in the blue humanities, marine sciences, and public policy will find much to value in this book. All of us who love the ocean should read it. -- Steve Mentz, Professor of English, St. John's University (New York) The rich collection of case studies in Sustaining Seas engages with the different appeals of the marine. Truly interdisciplinary at heart it promotes dialogue across, and within, different disciplines, incorporating specialists of different fields (artists, writers, planners, policy makers) about how to support the seas. Through the twenty four chapters of the book the authors share a common aspiration to build a better understanding of what it means 'to care for aquatic places and their biocultural communities'. -- Mara Miele, Professor in Human Geography, Cardiff University