Under Cape Cod Waters - Upcoming Author Events on the Cape

I have found out that an outstanding photographer Ethan Daniels, who is a trained Marine biologist and spends most of his time photographing on the water and exotic locales such as Belize, Palua, Micronesia is coming back to Cape Cod where he spent summers as a boy and has chosen the Cape as a subject of his first book-length collection titled .Under Cape Cod Waters

Ethan Daniels will be making a limited number of appearances in Boston and Cape Cod this summer. On July 27 at 6PM, he will be speaking at the Boston Public Library’s Central Branch, in an event open to the public. We invite the public to join us in listening to Ethan’s talk and to be submerged in fascinating underwater photography from local waters at the Cape Cod Museum of Natural History on July 28 at 7:30pm and at the Woods Hole Public Library on August 1 at 7:30pm, an event co-sponsored by Eight Cousins bookstore in Falmouth.

Here are a few questions and answers from Ethan about his book and the Cape.


1. Why did you take the marine environments of Cape Cod as a subject? What is interesting here? What inspired you to create this book? The largest influence in the evolution of Under Cape Cod Waters was a book that has been in my family’s house for 30 years, Shallow Waters written by Bill Sargent. The book follows a full year of marine ecology of Pleasant Bay. Reading about what was going on under the waters just a stone’s throw from my grandmother’s house was incredibly influential. It woke me up to the fact that there was mystery in the bay, found just below the waterline. I was entranced by the knowledge that all these strange creatures, from microscopic zooplankton to large schools of bluefish, went about their lives, living, reproducing and dying, amidst a world so different from yet intimately tied to our own.



2. In your book, you include photographs of the variety of marine environments found on the Cape-for example, the salt marsh as well as the fresh water ponds. Why did you think this was important? Under Cape Cod Waters incorporates images from a variety of underwater habitats, some that people don’t think about a lot. Many of the book’s images depict subjects that most people will never see. Part of putting this book together was to enlighten people of the beauty and ecological importance of the seldom-viewed subjects. Whether people ever observe these places and the species that live there or not, it is vital that they realize what roles they play in the overall functioning of Cape Cod’s natural processes.



3. What do you want readers to know about the marine environments of Cape Cod? One of the primary reasons I’ve always been drawn to the underwater world is that it harbors so many unknowns. We’ve yet to describe and properly classify all of marine life and have only just begun to understand how organisms interact with their environment, especially in aquatic environments. This is one of the characteristics of the Cape’s marine environments that I hope to impress upon people: how little we know as fact. The sea, bays, marshes, and even ponds continue to hold many mysteries. For all our technology, intelligence, and inquisitiveness, humans have only begun to scratch the surface of understanding our most widespread environments.

4. In your opinion, what does the future hold for Cape Cod and its residents and visitors? There is no debate that Cape will always be in flux. Its makeup is adapting to global as well as local changes as I sit writing. The factors affecting the peninsula are many but, personally, I’m most concerned about the number of people who inhabit this fragile peninsula that is in perpetual motion. It is my hope that people will soon build smarter, live more efficiently, and waste less resources en masse. Simple ideas, but difficult and sometimes costly to implement. Life as we know it cannot go on the way it has for the past century, resource after resource extracted and abused almost to the point of local extinction. If the region’s current population grows more conscious of decisions and can begin to think on a longer time scale, then a prosperous future is not out of reach. The Cape is not an isolated peninsula. It is intimately tied to New England and the eastern seaboard and, of course, the Atlantic Ocean. It is far time we, as a species, confronted basic critical issues that we have ignored for a long, long time.

Having viewed his pictures on both the website of the publisher and his website www.unionparkpress.com , and his website, www.oceanstockimages.com , I would state that his images are outstanding and I would recommend that people attend one of his lectures.