Reader’s Corner

Equal parts ecology, memoir, and natural history, Julia Whitty’s Deep Blue Home: An Intimate Ecology of Our Wild Ocean gives us unique access to the wet and salty two-thirds of the planet that makes everything else possible.

In some ways, Deep Blue Home, by Julia Whitty, is a reminder of the oneness of Earth’s watery parts. Take Whitty’s description of the North Atlantic—a kind of salty heart where thermohaline circulation doubles back on itself, exchanging warm water for cold and pumping it back into the far reaches of the Arctic, Pacific, Indian, and other oceans. In fact, Whitty reminds us, there’s only one ocean—a single, global sea, threaded together by this submarine mixing chamber and the twisting fluid highways it helps generate.

Marine animals string the ocean together, too. During the course of their marathon migrations, leatherback turtles are unwitting (or not) movers of matter and energy, shaping and linking land and marine ecosystems all over the planet. Their thick necks and paddles surface all over this book—weaving in and out of places as different and far apart as Baja, Newfoundland, and the bone-dry walls of a desert cave. Whitty shows how sea birds, jellyfish, icebergs, and others participate in this weaving too—each pulling taught a thread that binds sea to land to human. We yank at our peril.

Deep Blue Home is also a beautiful piece of natural history. In short, lyrical chapters that wind their way from the Gulf of California to Newfoundland, Whitty is both naturalist and compatriot. Her life’s rhythms fall in step with the likes of other watery characters—from peregrine falcons to moon jellies to Heermann’s gulls. Out on the ocean, “the dramas of the great world are replaced by more intimate stories,” Whitty writes. Maybe that’s what we need now: a world safe for these more intimate stories.

About the Author
Julia Whitty’s first book on oceans, The Fragile Edge, was awarded the John Burroughs Medal Award, the PEN USA Award, and the Kiriyama Prize. Her cover articles have appeared in Harper’s Magazine and Mother Jones, where she is an environmental correspondent. She blogs at the Blue Marble.

Learn More
Deep Blue Home: An Intimate Ecology of Our Wild Ocean
By Julia Whitty
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2010. Kindle edition available.

Read a review in the Sept/Oct 2010 issue of Orion.
Read an excerpt from the book.