Catastrophe By The Sea

From revered nature writer Brenda Peterson and told through striking and vibrant mixed-media collages by Caldecott Medalist Ed Young, Catastrophe by the Sea is a poignant story of redemption through empathy and compassion found in the most surprising places, and also provides a rich understanding of small creatures that live in a dangerous tidal zone. A lost cat roams the tide pools, pawing relentlessly at the small creatures that live there. One day an anemone confronts him and asks why he is alone and befriends him. In partnership with the Seattle Aquarium, Catastrophe by the Sea delivers a powerful message of finding understanding and friendship, and at the same time educates on the varied wildlife brimming in tide pools.

From revered nature writer Brenda Peterson and told through striking and vibrant mixed-media collages by Caldecott Medalist Ed Young, Catastrophe by the Sea is a poignant story of redemption through empathy and compassion found in the most surprising places, and also provides a rich understanding of small creatures that live in a dangerous tidal zone. A lost cat roams the tide pools, pawing relentlessly at the small creatures that live there. One day an anemone confronts him and asks why he is alone and befriends him. In partnership with the Seattle Aquarium, Catastrophe by the Sea delivers a powerful message of finding understanding and friendship, and at the same time educates on the varied wildlife brimming in tide pools. "For several years, the Seattle Aquarium has studied the role of empathy in promoting conservation. Empathy is the ability to perceive, understand and care about the experiences or perspectives of another person or animal. We most often feel empathy for other people, but we can also feel empathy for animals. This led us to the idea of a children's book. Animals are regular protagonists in children's books, but these characters are primarily vertebrates and often charismatic mammals. Could we create a book that would allow kids and their caregivers to empathize with strange and exotic marine animals, like sea anemones or barnacles? We hope this book strikes a chord with audiences and fosters empathy for animals less like us." --Jim Wharton, director of conservation engagement and learning at the Seattle Aquarium

The harrowing story of five men who were sent into a dark, airless, miles-long tunnel, hundreds of feet below the ocean, to do a nearly impossible job—with deadly results A quarter-century ago, Boston had the dirtiest harbor in America. The city had been dumping sewage into it for generations, coating the seafloor with a layer of “black mayonnaise.” Fisheries collapsed, wildlife fled, and locals referred to floating tampon applicators as “beach whistles.” In the 1990s, work began on a state-of-the-art treatment plant and a 10-mile-long tunnel—its endpoint stretching farther from civilization than the earth’s deepest ocean trench—to carry waste out of the harbor. With this impressive feat of engineering, Boston was poised to show the country how to rebound from environmental ruin. But when bad decisions and clashing corporations endangered the project, a team of commercial divers was sent on a perilous mission to rescue the stymied cleanup effort. Five divers went in; not all of them came out alive. Drawing on hundreds of interviews and thousands of documents collected over five years of reporting, award-winning writer Neil Swidey takes us deep into the lives of the divers, engineers, politicians, lawyers, and investigators involved in the tragedy and its aftermath, creating a taut, action-packed narrative. The climax comes just after the hard-partying DJ Gillis and his friend Billy Juse trade assignments as they head into the tunnel, sentencing one of them to death. An intimate portrait of the wreckage left in the wake of lives lost, the book—which Dennis Lehane calls "extraordinary" and compares with The Perfect Storm—is also a morality tale. What is the true cost of these large-scale construction projects, as designers and builders, emboldened by new technology and pressured to address a growing population’s rapacious needs, push the limits of the possible? This is a story about human risk—how it is calculated, discounted, and transferred—and the institutional failures that can lead to catastrophe. Suspenseful yet humane, Trapped Under the Sea reminds us that behind every bridge, tower, and tunnel—behind the infrastructure that makes modern life possible—lies unsung bravery and extraordinary sacrifice.

Chronicles the history, inner workings, passengers, sinking, and impact of the legendary liner.

Since the Viking ascendancy in the Middle Ages, the Atlantic has shaped the lives of people who depend upon it for survival. And just as surely, people have shaped the Atlantic. In his innovative account of this interdependency, W. Jeffrey Bolster, a historian and professional seafarer, takes us through a millennium-long environmental history of our impact on one of the largest ecosystems in the world. While overfishing is often thought of as a contemporary problem, Bolster reveals that humans were transforming the sea long before factory trawlers turned fishing from a handliner's art into an industrial enterprise. The western Atlantic's legendary fishing banks, stretching from Cape Cod to Newfoundland, have attracted fishermen for more than five hundred years. Bolster follows the effects of this siren's song from its medieval European origins to the advent of industrialized fishing in American waters at the beginning of the twentieth century. Blending marine biology, ecological insight, and a remarkable cast of characters, from notable explorers to scientists to an army of unknown fishermen, Bolster tells a story that is both ecological and human: the prelude to an environmental disaster. Over generations, harvesters created a quiet catastrophe as the sea could no longer renew itself. Bolster writes in the hope that the intimate relationship humans have long had with the ocean, and the species that live within it, can be restored for future generations.

A cloth bag containing eight copies of the title.

Over 40 first-hand accounts of peril on the high seas, from the wreck of the Medusa to the perfect storm, from Francis Chichester's account of superhuman tenacity battling hostile seas in Gipsy Moth while rounding Cape Horn to the tale of the Marie Celeste.

A new edition of the book that launched Elizabeth Kolbert's career as an environmental writer--updated with three new chapters, making it, yet again, "irreplaceable" (Boston Globe). Elizabeth Kolbert's environmental classic Field Notes from a Catastrophe first developed out of a groundbreaking, National Magazine Award-winning three-part series in The New Yorker. She expanded it into a still-concise yet richly researched and damning book about climate change: a primer on the greatest challenge facing the world today. But in the years since, the story has continued to develop; the situation has become more dire, even as our understanding grows. Now, Kolbert returns to the defining book of her career. She has added a chapter bringing things up-to-date on the existing text, plus three new chapters--on ocean acidification, the tar sands, and a Danish town that's gone carbon neutral--making it, again, a must-read for our moment.

Documents the events of the 1988 oil rig disaster on the North Sea, drawing on interviews with survivors and family members, the Occidental Petroleum Corp., and rescue workers to trace the gas leak that triggered the explosion and the devastation it continues to inflict.

Carl Safina has been hailed as one of the top 100 conservations of the 20th century (Audubon Magazine) and A Sea in Flames is his blistering account of the months-long manmade disaster that tormented a region and mesmerized the nation. Traveling across the Gulf to make sense of an ever-changing story and its often-nonsensical twists, Safina expertly deconstructs the series of calamitous misjudgments that caused the Deepwater Horizon blowout, zeroes in on BP’s misstatements, evasions, and denials, reassesses his own reaction to the government’s crisis handling, and reviews the consequences of the leak—and what he considers the real problems, which the press largely overlooked. Safina takes us deep inside the faulty thinking that caused the lethal explosion. We join him on aerial surveys across an oil-coated sea. We confront pelicans and other wildlife whose blue universe fades to black. Safina skewers the excuses and the silly jargon—like “junk shot” and “top kill”—that made the tragedy feel like a comedy of horrors—and highlighted Big Oil’s appalling lack of preparedness for an event that was inevitable. Based on extensive research and interviews with fishermen, coastal residents, biologists, and government officials, A Sea In Flames has some surprising answers on whether it was “Obama’s Katrina,” whether the Coast Guard was as inept in its response as BP was misleading, and whether this worst unintended release of oil in history was really America’s worst ecological disaster. Impassioned, moving, and even sharply funny, A Sea in Flames is ultimately an indictment of America’s main addiction. Safina writes: “In the end, this is a chronicle of a summer of pain—and hope. Hope that the full potential of this catastrophe would not materialize, hope that the harm done would heal faster than feared, and hope that even if we didn’t suffer the absolutely worst—we’d still learn the big lesson here. We may have gotten two out of three. That’s not good enough. Because: there’ll be a next time.”