Steve Backshall

Take a deep breath

Steve Backshall was nine years old the first time he saw a shark, while on holiday with his family in Malaysia. It was the beginning of a life-long fascination with these 'lords of the sea', and the oceanic life around them. His career as one of the world's most popular naturalists and explorers has taken him to countless underwater places, many never before seen by others. And he's also been witness to the startling decline in fortune of our oceans' wild inhabitants over the past fifty years.

Deep Blue is a book a lifetime in the making: a remarkable blend of memoir, travel, and marine and environmental science that takes us on an unforgettable tour of the many worlds of aquatic life: from underwater deserts and rainforests to the evolution of ocean heroes like the sea turtle and the Great White, from the genesis of ocean life to the rapidly declining state of white polar seas and coral reefs. It's both a love letter to our precious oceans and rallying cry for what we must to do save them.

Deep Blue

For most of history, man has had to fight nature to survive; in this century he is beginning to realise that, in order to survive, he must protect it.

As a very lapsed Catholic, I find it a gloriously heretical idea that Genesis did not happen in the heavens, but that life might have instead been born in the hellfire of Hades.

Deep Blue quotes

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