Part of Series
"The author makes an eloquent plea for marine biodiversity conservation."—Library Journal "Harvell seems to channel the devotion that motivated the Blaschkas."—The Guardian Winner of the 2016 National Outdoor Book Award, Environment Category It started with a glass octopus. Dusty, broken, and all but forgotten, it caught Drew Harvell’s eye. Fashioned in intricate detail by the father-son glassmaking team of Leopold and Rudolf Blaschka, the octopus belonged to a menagerie of unusual marine creatures that had been packed away for decades in a storage unit. More than 150 years earlier, the Blaschkas had been captivated by marine invertebrates and spun their likenesses into glass, documenting the life of oceans untouched by climate change and human impacts. Inspired by the Blaschkas’ uncanny replicas, Harvell set out in search of their living counterparts. In A Sea of Glass, she recounts this journey of a lifetime, taking readers along as she dives beneath the ocean's surface to a rarely seen world, revealing the surprising and unusual biology of some of the most ancient animals on the tree of life. On the way, we glimpse a century of change in our ocean ecosystems and learn which of the living matches for the Blaschkas’ creations are, indeed, as fragile as glass. Drew Harvell and the Blaschka menagerie are the subjects of the documentary Fragile Legacy, which won the Best Short Film award at the 2015 Blue Ocean Film Festival & Conservation Summit. Learn more about the film and check out the trailer here.
Author
Drew Harvell is Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Cornell University and Curator of the Blaschka Marine Invertebrate Collection. She teaches courses in marine ecology, marine invertebrate biodiversity and conservation oceanography. Her research on the sustainability of marine ecosystems has taken her from directing projects with The World Bank on the reefs of Mexico, Indonesia, Myanmar and Hawaii to the cold waters of the Pacific Northwest. She is a Fellow of the Ecological Society of America and the Atkinson Center for a Sustainable Future and a winner of the Society of American Naturalist Jasper Loftus-Hills Award. She has published over 170 articles in journals such as Science, Nature, and Ecology and her lab was most recently featured in New York Times article,https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/16/sc.... https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/30/cl... Her first book, A Sea of Glass (2016) won a National Outdoor Book Award for Natural History Literature, a Rachel Carson Environmental Literature Award and was one of 2016’s best “Art Meets Science” books by Smithsonian Magazine and was featured by Discover, Scientific American, The Guardian, The New York Times and Nature. Her second book, Ocean Outbreak: Confronting a Rising Tide of Marine Disease, releases April 2019.
