Blue Frontier: Saving America's Living Seas. (New and Noteworthy).

Blue Frontier: Saving America's Living Seas, by David Helvarg (New York: W.H. Freeman and Company, 2001). The westward push for new land to be logged, mined, farmed, and otherwise extracted reshaped much of the United States in the last 200 years. And while the U.S. land rush is largely a thing of the past, Blue Frontier shows that the country has shifted its frontier to a new area--a U.S.-controlled region of the oceans that is six times the size of the Louisiana Purchase.

David Helvarg's entertaining exploration of this American wilderness brings to light how much scientists have yet to learn about the oceans and how quickly the country is degrading its rich resource by polluting waters with farm and industrial runoff; overfishing depleted stocks; eroding shores by promoting construction on fragile coasts; drilling, shipping, and spilling oil without proper precaution; upsetting complex climatic cycles through excessive fossil-fuel burning; and pushing forward with numerous other abuses.

Even so, Blue Frontier suggests that there is time to change the way we treat the oceans, which are increasingly the focus of greater concern and attention. Helvarg calls for better ocean stewardship and points out numerous opportunities for effective policies and local action. "It is not every great nation," he writes, "forged by its earliest frontier experiences, that gets a second chance."