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—butI 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