The deep blue friend

A call to action to stop treating the planet’s oceans as dumping grounds

- REENA SINGH

THE OCEAN HAS been here for billions of years. It has seen mass extinctions, ice ages, and the rise of civilisations.

Yet in David Attenborough’s Ocean: Earth’s Last Wilderness, the sea is not presented as an immovable constant but as a living, fragile and complex system. David Attenborough, with his characteristic warmth and authority, invites us beneath the surface of our planet’s largest and least understood realm. More than two-thirds of Earth is cloaked in water, yet we have explored only a fraction of it. The structure of the book mirrors the descent of a diver. We begin in the shallow, sunlit waters where coral reefs are described as “the most dazzling array of life anywhere in the world’s ocean’. These reefs, like bustling underwater cities, pulse with colour and energy. From there, he guides us into the diverse kelp forests, the deeper twilight zones where sunlight fades and bioluminescent creatures glimmer like stars, and finally into the crushing depths where few creatures survive.