Review: Planet Ocean

Planet Ocean: Photo Stories from the 'Defending Our Oceans' Voyage by Sara Holden was recently released. It's a coffee table book that brings together beautiful imagery as well as the human impacts imperiling that beauty and, in this case, what Greenpeace is doing about it,including scenes from their most recent expedition. On behalf of Greenpeace, Holden argues that 40% of the oceans should be set aside as marine reserve, which would cost an estimated $12 billion per year. If this seems like a lot, Holden is quick to point out that we spend $20 billion each year in the U.S. on ice cream.

Other revealing sections of book include photos on the foreign fleet sex trade, new research underway (such as the debris sampler), and the section on Greenpeace's defense of the ocean (including a great photo of survivor-suited activists contorted on the ice into the cry: Help End Whaling!). I wish the chapter on Greenpeace's campaigns had been longer and included a historical perpsective (the organization began in Vancouver in 1971). I also found the book lacked the edginess I've come to expect from Greenpeace.

But Holden does present some great anecdotes, that are also relevant to Shifting Baselines, such as this perspective of technology from a long-lived Orange roughy:

A 150-year-old Orange roughy fish alive today has survived 30 U.S. Presidents, 39 British Prime Ministers and 11 Popes. In that span we have gone from horse and cart to walking on the moon, but it is only in the last 70 years that we have had the technology to truly understand the sheer scale of the grand canyons, vast mountain chains, waterfalls, volcanoes, forests of coral higher than ten storey buildings and underwater caves deep below us.

Planet Ocean brings us images from the ocean's depths, not unlike those from Pribilof Canyon as well as photographs of the problems and the activists inspired to solve them. I am still most inspired by those determined activists that capture that 1971 spirit of Greenpeace and continue to protect our oceans on behalf of the future and the voiceless.