The Sea is Not Made of Water: Life Between The Tides by Adam Nicolson doesn’t provide a comprehensive answer to how to reverse decades of us ruining the planet while creating thoroughly miserable, poverty-ridden, insecure societies. But it provides a very good idea of the directions in which we need to travel. Because we can’t undo this damage by continuing with the thinking that produced our current systems – certainly not conventional economics, or the reductive science that dominates much of our research agenda.
The book is probably best described as a work of natural history, an approach dating back centuries that is enjoying a resurgence, in academia and in our schools, with calls for it to be made into a GCSE course.
It looks at nature to learn – from the practical to the deepest philosophical terms – about our world, how we fit into it, and how we should live in it.
Nicolson starts in the microcosm – a tiny work of co-creation between human and nature, drawing from his own hard labour of three rock pools on the Scottish coast. He describes the tiny, multitudinous creatures most texts dismiss in a sentence or two, such as sandhoppers – tiny crustaceans that have two, interconnected nervous systems, “one for ordinary life and one for crises”. Both of which, when he looks into in detail, are extraordinarily sophisticated. And the ‘crisis’ side produces responses very like our own in similar situations.
But that also raises a fascinating question – our entire thinking about life, about what an organism is, is based on our own, single-system model. What happens if you have two different, if interconnected, controlling systems? What is your ‘identity’.
Humans aren’t the pinnacle of evolution
Nicolson’s approach demonstrates the kind of respect and curiosity that we need – a move away from assuming modern humans and current society as some kind of pinnacle of evolution and development, to recognising the complexity and value of different ways of life, and ourselves in an intermeshed, and totally dependent, part of that.
And yet the book also values the individual tale of creatures great and small. The account of the reproductive life of the green crabs – in which the females can only mate soon after shedding their shells and rely, before and after that, on the protection of the male, which carries them around, clasped to their chests, during the time of soft-shell vulnerability – is stunning in its complexity, and its care.
That’s the kind of word that ‘science’ has refused to engage with in the animal world, with the determination to put up a solid wall between emotion and animal behaviour, yet how damaging – and utterly inaccurate – Nicolson demonstrates that is.
Looking back in history
To find a holistic approach to the world – the opposite of modern reductionism – Nicolson goes back to the ancient Greeks, to Heraclitus, who wrote: “Man’s life is indissociably bound up with his whole surroundings. Wisdom consists in understanding the Logos, the common element of arrangement in things, embodying the ‘measure’, which ensures that change does not produce disconnected, chaotic plurality.” That sounds very like what we call the Gaia hypothesis.
But Nicolson also ventures into the local folk/fairy tales and the rich language of Gaelic. He notes, “just as human ecology was open to the world of the animals at one end, there was scarcely a boundary between people and fairies”.
It’s a reminder that the people of the past were biologically identical to us, just as intelligent and creative as us, and found different ways of living and understanding – ways that were sustained for tens of thousands of years, something we show few signs of managing.
Sharing knowledge
It’s also a reminder of the power and importance of narrative in sharing ideas that people can connect to and remember. I know from politics that telling stories is essential to communicate with people and communities. But so is physical engagement. You can read all the briefings written, but no briefing takes the place of a physical visit – boots on the ground, hands in the soil (or sand).
Nicolson offers us a new way of looking at and thinking about the world. But also, a path towards a new kind of politics – one grounded in humility and the knowledge of how little impact human decisions have against the forces of nature, and how we need to work within the physical limits of this planet, while respecting all of the creatures on it.
But if you just love the seashore, and the creatures on it, and want a captivating account of their beauty and the latest amazing discoveries about how they live in this difficult, power-drenched environment, well you could easily read The Sea is Not Made of Water just for that. How beadlet anemones clone themselves, drive off non-clone rivals (really!) and deposit their clones in the space so freed up, is a stunning tale all on its own: a really different way of living to our own.
