From Glaciers to the Deep Sea | Shorewords!

October 19, 2023

A literary expedition through the water cycle.

Join Shorewords host, Lesley Ewing, in conversation with Rachel Taylor, one of the people who helped develop Water Worlds: The Protection of our Blue Planet from Glaciers to Deep Sea. Water Worlds is a carefully organized, beautifully illustrated collection of 12 different water environments that introduces the science and some of the people and groups who are working with their communities to reverse some of the degradation of water ecosystems resulting from mining, land development, and climate change.

Show Transcription
This transcription was generated by a computer. Please excuse any errors.
Lesley Ewing

Hello. I’m Lesley Ewing, host of Shorewords!. This podcast combines two of my favorite things – the ocean and books. I learned to swim before I could walk and looked forward each summer to my family’s vacation at Ocean City, Maryland. As a student I was interested in science and engineering and became an environmental engineer before learning that there was something called coastal engineering. Both my 1 st and 2 nd mid-life crises resulted in me going back to school – first for a Masters of Engineering at UC Berkeley and later for a Ph.D. from the University of Southern California. The first crisis also moved me from DC to the SF Bay. The second crisis reminded me how much I liked to read. Getting a Ph.D. while working a 40+-hour/week job meant that my only reading was work reports, text books and technical articles. They were all important and interesting books, but as soon as school ended, I replaced my academic text books with broader literature and realized that the coast was often a character in the fiction and non-fiction that I read. I am still fascinated by every visit to the ocean and remain in awe of what others write about the coast.