There are dedicated journalists and science writers, like George Monbiot, David Wallace-Wells and Elizabeth Kolbert, who address environmental issues in an activist spirit that can be traced back to Rachel Carson’s groundbreaking Silent Spring (1962). Within the broad category of contemporary nature writing, it is possible to identify two general tendencies. Such, and so magnifying, is the virtue of a large and liberal theme! We expand to its bulk. Give me a condor’s quill! Give me Vesuvius’ crater for an inkstand! Friends, hold my arms! For the mere act of penning my thoughts of this Leviathan, they weary me, and make me faint with their outreaching comprehensiveness of sweep, as if to include the whole circle of the sciences, and all the generations of whales, and men, and mastodons, past, present, and to come, with all the revolving panoramas of empire on Earth, and throughout the whole universe, not excluding its suburbs. Evocative and inspiring, Fathoms marks the arrival of an essential new voice.How, then, with me, writing of this Leviathan? Unconsciously my chirography expands into placard capitals.

With depth and clarity, Giggs outlines the challenges we face as we attempt to understand the perspectives of other living beings, and our own place on an evolving planet.

In the spirit of Rachel Carson and Rebecca Solnit, Giggs gives us a vivid exploration of the natural world even as she addresses what it means to write about nature at a time of environmental crisis. We travel to Japan to board the ships that hunt whales and delve into the deepest seas to discover how plastic pollution pervades our earth’s undersea environment.

Fathoms: The World in the Whale blends natural history, philosophy, and science to explore: How do whales experience ecological change? How has whale culture been both understood and altered by human technology? What can observing whales teach us about the complexity, splendour, and fragility of life? In Fathoms, we learn about whales so rare they have never been named, whale songs that sweep across hemispheres in annual waves of popularity, and whales that have modified the chemical composition of our planet’s atmosphere. When writer Rebecca Giggs encountered a humpback whale stranded on her local beachfront in Australia, she began to wonder how the lives of whales reflect the condition of our oceans.

Fathoms by Rebecca Giggs