Understanding Planet Ocean Like Never Before With James Bradley
How did the ocean get here? And how did it make us human? We chat to James Bradley, author of Deep Water: The World in the Ocean, about his incredible book that weaves science, history, and personal reflection together to explore how the ocean connects every living being on this blue planet.
We’ll discuss discoveries mentioned in the book, such as how groupers “point” and hunt together with moray eels, how elephant seals are helping to gather data from the mesopelagic zone, and - most importantly - how despair is not an option when it comes to planetary crisis. An unmissable conversation!
See below for show notes, relevant links, and more!
Show Notes
Tell us a bit about yourself and how you came to write the book.
So Deep Water is trying to kind of use the ocean as a lens to think about a whole series of questions about colonialism, about capitalism, about our relationship with the natural world, about, you know, how we think about our place in the scheme of things.
I'm a novelist originally. I've been writing fiction for 30 years. And alongside that, I've had this kind of career as a journalist. And over the last 10 or 15 years, I have been writing a lot more in the environmental space around climate and animals and questions like that.
But this book actually goes back a lot further, I first started thinking about it almost 25 years ago. I used to go surfing with my brother and some friends, and we'd go body surfing a lot. And I used to love that feeling of being out there in the kind of back break where you get that kind of movement of the swell. And I used to love that sense that when you're out there, you can feel a different kind of temporal scale around you. And I remember thinking, I want to write about this. I want to write a book which is about the ocean, which is about trying to use the ocean to think about time and the world and how it all fits together.
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