United States
£ GBP
Traces a commonplace average – sea level – from its origins in charting land to its emergence as a symbol of global warming.
News reports warn of rising sea levels spurred by climate change. Waters inch ever higher, disrupting delicate ecosystems and threatening island and coastal communities. The baseline for these measurements – sea level – may seem unremarkable, a long-familiar zero point for altitude. But as Wilko Graf von Hardenberg reveals, the history of defining and measuring sea level is intertwined with national ambitions, commercial concerns, and shifting relationships between people and the ocean.
Sea Level provides a detailed and innovative account of how mean sea level was first defined, how it became the prime reference point for surveying and cartography, and how it emerged as a powerful mark of humanity's impact on the earth. With Hardenberg as our guide, we traverse the muddy spaces of Venice and Amsterdam, the coasts of the Baltic Sea, the Panama and Suez canals, and the Himalayan foothills. Born out of Enlightenment studies of physics and quantification, sea level became key to state-sponsored public works, colonial expansion, Cold War development of satellite technologies, and recognizing the climate crisis. Mean sea level, Hardenberg reveals, is not a natural occurrence – it has always been contingent, the product of people, places, politics, and evolving technologies. As global warming transforms the globe, Hardenberg reminds us that a holistic understanding of the ocean and its changes requires a multiplicity of reference points.
A fascinating story that revises our assumptions about land and ocean alike, Sea Level calls for a more nuanced understanding of this baseline, one that allows for new methods and interpretations as we navigate an era of unstable seas.
Series Editors' Foreword
Introduction: From Heights to Muds
One: Finding Sea Level
Two: Infrastructures of Measure
Three: Standards of Height
Four: Theories of Change
Five: Going Global
Six: The Rising Tide
Acknowledgments
Notes
References
Index
Wilko Graf von Hardenberg is a Berlin-based historian of science and the environment. He currently leads the project The Sound of Nature: Soundscapes and Environmental Awareness, 1750-1950, at Humboldt University in Berlin. He is the author of A Monastery for the Ibex: Conservation, State, and Conflict on the Gran Paradiso, 1919-1949 and the coauthor of Mussolini's Nature: An Environmental History of Italian Fascism.
"Like the metre, the minute, or the meridian that runs through Greenwich, England, 'sea level' is best thought of as a social and historical construct, the result of an inherently arbitrary decision taken by generations of people doing their best to make sense of a strange and chaotic world. Von Hardenberg's history is a story not of the way sea level has changed over time but, rather, of the ways in which humans have understood, and made use of, sea level as a concept, a marker of where we stand in the world."
– New Yorker
"Sea Level is a delightfully compacted study, refreshingly free of the kind of doomsaying that usually accompanies this subject. And the sotto voce warning about hobbling science with the politics of the moment is unfortunately pointed."
– Open Letters Review
"Sea Level is a powerful reminder that examining the history of scientific values can shed light on both the structure of modern science and its impact on the near future. This book is concise, well written, and informative, and it is a strong example of what ocean history has to offer."
– Science
"Traversing major debates within the history of science, Hardenberg offers his readers an interdisciplinary account of the abstraction and mathematization of the global coastlines. He tells this story from a unique vantage point located in the present climate politics. Thoroughly researched, highly original, and robustly argued, this book is a pleasure to read."
– Debjani Bhattacharyya, author of Empire and Ecology in the Bengal Delta: The Making of Calcutta
