India, April 22 -- This is your first non-fiction book. What drew you to the subject of oceans?

I thought about the idea 25 years ago where I wanted to use the ocean to think about questions of history, environment and our relationship to the natural world. Obviously, the ocean shapes the world. It underpins the carbon and water cycles and is absolutely fundamental to the climate system. But the ocean also shapes the world in less obvious ways. Shipping is the global economy's engine and enables the extraction systems that global capitalism depends upon. International trade doesn't exist without it. Fishing feeds several billion people. The network of submarine cables enables the Internet. It's also a fundamental part of the climate cris...