The Log from the Sea of Cortez

"This was recommended to me by my marine conservationist brother. I had no idea Steinbeck was interested in science. I thought he was a novelist of human rights and the American working class. This book is the log of a journey he made with a scientist he befriended while he was living in Monterey in southern California. They go on this boys’ trip, hiring a retired sardine fishing boat for nine weeks and collecting invertebrates – crabs, lobsters, snails. It’s about amateur enthusiasm for the natural world and Steinbeck is a truly great science writer. He conveys a boyish enthusiasm for nature but some truly grown-up observations about man’s place in it – a real prescience for an environmental movement that hadn’t arrived when this book was written in 1941. It’s part Three Men in a Boat and part serious natural philosophy. It made me think about my relationship with nature and that you don’t need to be a scientist to be interested in the natural world. He describes a memorable study he’d heard about where someone sits in the boat department of Sears and Roebuck and watches men walk by a fishing boat. The vast majority of men that pass the boat tap on its hull – quite involuntarily – and he wonders if it’s some innate memory in man of the ability to survive on water, a primal understanding of the healthy hollow ring a carved canoe has to have in order to float. He talks about the evolutionary connection between man and water, stuff that Dawkins would probably hate. A scientist couldn’t do this because there is no mechanistic explanation, no direct evidence and yet we know it’s there. So he speculates. It’s a great bit of science writing and people who aren’t scientists should read it. It’s open to everyone!"