Deep Blue Home: An Intimate Ecology of Our Wild Ocean

By Julia Whitty

At the center of Deep Blue Home—a penetrating exploration of the ocean as single vast current and of the creatures dependent on it—is Whitty’s description of the three-dimensional ocean river, far more powerful than the Nile or the Amazon, encircling the globe. It’s a watery force connected to the earth’s climate control and so to the eventual fate of the human race. 

Whitty’s thirty-year career as a documentary filmmaker and diver has given her sustained access to the scientists dedicated to the study of an astonishing range of ocean life, from the physiology of “extremophile” life forms to the strategies of nesting seabirds to the ecology of “whale falls” (what happens upon the death of a behemoth). 

No stranger to extreme adventure, Whitty travels the oceanside and underwater world from the Sea of Cortez to Newfoundland to Antarctica. In the Galapagos, in one of the book’s most haunting encounters, she realizes: “I am about to learn the answer to my long-standing question about what would happen to a person in the water if a whale sounded directly alongside—would she, like a person afloat beside a sinking ship, be dragged under too?” 

This book provides extraordinary armchair entree to gripping adventure, cutting-edge science, and an intimate understanding of our deep blue home.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins
• Release date: Jul 9, 2010
• ISBN: 9780547487076

Julia Whitty

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 and Deep Blue Home.

Reviews for Deep Blue Home

[mrs_mcgreevy · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This thematically-linked series of essays gives a simple and compelling portrait of some of the various animals that either live in the sea or rely on it for sustenance, and of what their eventual disappearance will cost us, both economically and scientifically. Whitty's sense of wonder is contagious, and it's impossible to read her words without getting caught up in them.

[mckait · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I'm ashamed to admit that I practice avoidance. The truth is that it all seems to be too much for me at times. War, climate change politics...wait, they're all the same thing, aren't they? Well, What drew me to Deep Blue Home, quite frankly was it's cover. I love turtles, tortoises, dolphins, whales and in fact, I love animals of all types. I may not be so keen on the two legged human variety at times. We are so arrogant, and all knowing, but only I'm afraid in our own minds. The truth of it is that humans all seem to have an agenda, and that agenda is to make their own lives better, and to have more money than everyone else, never mind the cost to others. At least, all too many humans seem to be this way.I wanted this book to bring me joy. I wanted it to be a beautiful peek into the lives of creatures who live in mystery in the beautiful blue oceans that cover most of our planet. I wanted to see them leaping joyfully, swimming peacefully and in fact, being happy in ways that human can never be. The imagery created by the author was in fact beautiful, and compelling. The story, however was not. It brought home to me in ways that I had been avoiding acknowledgement of, that things are worse that I imagined them to be. That we were killing our planet and its beautiful life in so many ways, big and small.Julia Whitty did more than describe our seas and their populations, she brought home the fact with a passionate and no nonsense approach, that our seas are dying and we are guilty of killing them. It made me sad, it made me afraid, and it made me feel powerless. I'm not sorry that I read this book, but what I read made me feel sorry. It made me feel sorry for things that I have no direct hand in doing, and sorry for not knowing some of the ways that we are spoiling our home. I think everyone should read this one.