There is a lovely shorter book in The Last Great Sea – or several different shorter books. As it is, too much of the material here strays from Glavin’s theme, passages and ideas are repeated, and the book – ostensibly a history of the North Pacific Sea and the environmental challenges facing the region – lacks a coherent narrative thread and structure. However, Glavin knows his subject and cares passionately about it. He also occasionally writes hauntingly powerful sentences and explains technical ecological issues in an accessible, readable way.

The book begins promisingly, with a disclaimer from Glavin that he’s evoking and informing, not offering solutions, followed by a plea to the reader: “…despite the folly of our mistakes, and all of our Utopian conceits, and the lateness of the hour, it is still quite possible to decide what kind of ocean [the Pacific] might be.”

In the first chapter, Glavin presents a persuasive but overly detailed refutation of the conventional notion of how the North American continent was first peopled, by hunter-gatherers crossing from Asia. His counter-argument, that maritime fishing cultures spread south along the coast earlier or at the same time, seems reasonable enough, but he thumps the older theory wearyingly.

To his credit, Glavin shows clearly the folly of trying to “manage” nature and of reducing nature’s complex interactions to orderly, rational, and hierarchical units. His recounting of the terrible damage industrial civilization is doing to the oceans is dispiriting in all the right ways. In the final passages, he returns to the elegiac tone of the opening section, and calls for a reconciliation of science and belief, which he is convinced will enable us to devise, in the end, the world we want to inhabit.