Oceans, Seas and Shorelines A Cultural Introduction

While humans have successfully exploited the Earth’s land surfaces, the seventy percent of our planet covered by water has confronted them with greater challenges and many seemingly insoluble mysteries. Oceans and seas, and the shorelines that connect them with land, continue to escape human grasp, and that elusiveness persists despite unrelenting and multifaceted human engagement with the great waters. Oceans, seas and shorelines have been harvested to meet every kind of human need, and they have also been appropriated in art, literature, music and human representations of cultural identity throughout human history, across every means of expressing thought and feeling. They continue to be central to economic prosperity, and at the same time sites of entertainment and leisure that sustain tourism and boost economies across the planet. And yet these environments remain unpredictable and elemental: forces to be reckoned with and an enduring challenge to human invention and innovation. This book introduces the Routledge Oceans, Seas and Shorelines: Cultural, Environmental and Natural Histories multidisciplinary series. Chapters approach issues affecting these environments from different disciplinary perspectives with the aim of increasing our understanding of, and respect for, ocean, sea and shoreline environments. The volume will be of interest to specialists in relevant fields, to students working on marine and oceanographic courses, and on others which touch upon the history, literature and administration of seas and littorals, and to a general readership engaged with the transcendent challenges facing our planet in the twenty-first century.