Except it wasn't, and it isn't. The poetics stand corrected by the science. Contrary to the belief that man cannot mark the sea with ruin, it turns out that he has been doing so for the last two thousand years. If I had been slow to acknowledge the unwelcome fact, I was in distinguished company. Henry David Thoreau in the 1850s did not "associate the idea of antiquity with the ocean, nor wonder how it looked a thousand years ago, as we do of the land, for it was equally wild and unfathomable always."
Rachel Carson, the perceptive and far-seeing naturalist, in 1951 assured the readers of The Sea Around Us that mankind "cannot control or change the ocean as, in his brief tenancy on earth, he has subdued and plundered the continents." She subsequently revised the opinion, remarking in one of her later notebooks, "Even in the vast and mysterious reaches of the sea we are brought back to the fundamental truth that nothing lives to itself."
By the turn of the millennium, I understood that the melting of the Arctic ice was warming the temperatures in the sea, that fish stocks were declining, that large sectors of the ocean were awash in nonbiodegradable refuse -- cathode-ray tubes, traffic cones, and polypropylene fishing nets -- but I didn't fully grasp the connection between marine ecosystem and human settlement until January 2013, when I came across W. Jeffrey Bolster's book The Mortal Sea.
Bolster derives the title and its assertion from an extended history of the fisheries in the North American Atlantic between Cape Cod and Newfoundland. To the by-now-familiar story of the various depletions of species over the last 500 years (the haddock by 1930, the cod by 1992), Bolster, a professor of history at the University of New Hampshire, adds the dimension of events taking place on land -- political and economic, cultural and demographic. Drawing together in the same net the two sets of datapoints (from the human maritime community and the marine-biological community), Bolster shows the ocean to be subject not only to the changes occurring over the course of evolutionary and geological time, but also, and ever more rapidly, to those imposed on it by the hand and mind of man.
We needn't call upon an angry god to make the sea an object of no small terror. Every year we withdraw from it 160 million tons of fish, deposit in it 7 million tons of garbage. Poisonous chemicals in the Gulf of Mexico have formed a pool of dead water equivalent in size to the state of New Jersey; among the several hundred dead zones elsewhere in the world, one encircles the Chinese coastline.
If the sea levels continue to rise at their current rate, the day is not far off when Miami and Atlantic City become beds for oysters. The fishing in the sea that was once near the surface now is done by trawls the length of locomotives dropped to the depth of a mile and dragged across the bottom, reducing many thousands of square miles of the ocean floor to barren deserts no longer giving birth to the tiny organisms from which emerge the great chains of being that sustain the life of the planet.
Nothing in the sea lives by itself, nothing either on the earth or in the air or in the minds of men. To know the sea is mortal is to know that we are not apart from it. Man is nature creatively refashioning itself. The abyss is human, not divine, a work in progress, whether made with a poet's metaphor or with a vast prodigious bulk of Styrofoam.
Lewis H. Lapham is editor of Lapham's Quarterly and a TomDispatch regular. Formerly editor of Harper's Magazine , he is the author of numerous books, including Money and Class in America , Theater of War , Gag Rule , and, most recently, Pretensions to Empire. The New York Times has likened him to H.L. Mencken; Vanity Fair has suggested a strong resemblance to Mark Twain; and Tom Wolfe has compared him to Montaigne. This essay, slightly adapted for TomDispatch, introduces "The Sea," the Summer 2013 issue of Lapham's Quarterly , soon to be released at that website.
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Copyright 2013 Lewis Lapham
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