ABSTRACT
This chapter demonstrates that John Steinbeck and Edward F. Ricketts recorded their findings, collected specimens, and pondered the meaning of biological life on earth; the result was the 1941 coauthored travelogue, Sea of Cortez. It explores early ideas of sustainability at sea, environmental health, and the interconnectedness of the human body and other bodies. Steinbeck's writing on the laboring classes is considered a classic work of literature about the labor movement, but it is less often considered in terms of its deep ecological implications. Although Steinbeck's Dust Bowl fiction lacks a certain rebellious tone because it is set within United States borders, his sea-based writing directly questions the ethics of environmental depletion and the cataclysmic implications of harvesting marine life. Oceanic space is a place to ponder the human body as materiality and its relationship to other material and immaterial bodies, and the limitations of humans at sea.
