Monday, July 5, 2010

CONNECTING THE WORLD: A BEACH TAIL





With the BP disaster the thick black oil threatening beaches on the gulf coast of the US and beyond, I got to thinking.  Oceans around the world connect us all and so my latest  picture book, A Beach Tail, suggests a new theme in light of that notion

Does the same water that touches Cape Cod Massachusetts also touch the shores of Europe and Africa? Asia? Did those Pelicans that we see so many images of, confused as they struggle to move, covered in a slick black death, once migrate from continent to continent?  And so too with much other wild life affected by the worst disaster in oil drilling history, the fish and sea weed.  Do some of them touch distant shores as the water does?














A Beach Tail presents a small adventure in a relatively untouched example of a one of Earth’s most important ecosystems.    What will happen to the star fish, the horse shoe crab and the ghost crab featured in this book, the sea grasses and the jelly fish?   How far reaching will the devastation be?    And for how long?  How will the fragile ecosystem and our world be changed by the torture of our oceans and beaches?

BEACHES I HAVE KNOWN AROUND THE WORLD WHERE I HAVE TOUCHED THE OCEAN:  New England, Cape Cod, Maine, New Hampshire Georgia, New York, Maryland, Spain, Italy, France, Haiti, Kenya...