from the diary: “Thursday 2/27/86
“I finished The Blue Planet: a celebration of the earth and returned it to the library. Not much of it stuck, but she had a nice style. Rather put me to sleep, tho’.”
Blue Planet, besides its soporific qualities, had a lot interesting of things to say about Earth as a dynamic system. I remember the author talking about beaches and how they are built through natural processes. Beaches are built via the action of winds, waves, tides, and living things. There are beaches built of different kinds of sands. In Hawaii there are white sand beaches (ground-up coral), black sand beaches (ground-up lava), and a green sand beach or two (ground-up olivine, which is a kind of volcanic rock). She even describes a beach built of flattened tin cans.
There's an excerpt from the book here. Coincidentally it's from the author's ruminations on the shore.
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