Beneath Cold Seas: the Underwater Wilderness of the Pacific Northwest, by David Hall. Greystone and Suzuki Foundation, 2011
Some useful text but mostly taken up with spectacular colour photography this large-format delight reveals what you don't see by gazing across the surface of the seas. It is too easy, admiring the vista, the horizon and the skies above, to forget that the underwater world is like another planet, full of startlingly varied and intricately related plants and animals, from huge marine mammals to microscopic algae. Unless you are a diver, or you haul the beasts up brutally from the depths below, you won't get to view this world.
There are lots of online sources of imagery and information of course, but somehow nothing evokes wonder like a book you can set before you and leaf through page by page in the old-fashioned way. Another such gorgeous tome is The Sunshine Coast: From Gibsons to Powell River, 2nd edition, by Howard White and Dean Van't Schip. Harbour Publishing, 2011. Here we get geological history and contemporary glimpses of B.C.'s west coast communities both human and biological. Treescapes, harbours, inlets, villages and rock formations: all presented here are at risk from the shipping that plies this stormy, craggy, island-strewn coast, and under much greater threat again from the increased tanker traffic and oil exploration drilling that some recommend. The Canadian and the Chinese governments and their oil corporation partners who intend to ram a pipeline past protesting British Columbians so as to get that tar sands oil to China whatever the cost, are ignoring -- completely blanking out -- the reality of the shorelines and ocean depths revealed in these books.
It is a case of out of sight, out of mind for much of the public, a situation which the oil corporations and their politician-supporters rely on. These books bring the marine depths to mind, vividly, and should have a place in every public library.
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