Two of my colleagues at Topanga New Times suggested, with a sly wink to each other, that I take a look at The Overstory (2018) by Richard Powers. I now know that the wink between them was the signal that “Jimmy’s gonna love this one.” Ah, they know me so well. The Overstory is a marvelously entertaining and enlightening book that drives home a profound, timely, and ridiculously obvious message… science and technology have contributed to dramatic transformations of the planet we all call home. And, as many of us revel in comfort, it appears that our hubris has blinded us to the implications of these changes.*
So, after reading, writing about, and being totally floored by The Overstory (2018), I decided to check out Powers’ most recent book, Playground (2024).
This absolutely fascinating tale includes several story lines varied in time and place which converge in the present day on the tiny remote island of Makatea in the South Pacific Ocean. That’s all I have to say about the plot although the characters offer clues.
The diverse cast populating these stories includes a ridiculously wealthy tech billionaire with a passionate interest in Artificial Intelligence; his best friend, an idealistic poet who ponders the meaning of life through the ancient Chinese board game of Go, and a woman living on Makatea as the debris of modern society washes up on her shore.
As interesting as each of these appears to be, the most striking character in Playground is Evelyne (Evie) Beaulieu because it is through her life that the story’s primary message is delivered to us today. Just as The Overstory informs us that clear-cutting old-growth forests amounts to slow suicide, The Playground explores what we have learned about and what we have done to the Earth’s oceans. The fiction is delightful while the modern reality is terrifying. Bolstering that reality is that Evie’s biography mirrors the real life of pioneering oceanographer Dr. Sylvia Earle, who turns 92 this month (August 2026). Dr. Earle was named Time Magazine’s “first Hero of the Planet” in 1998.**
A young Evie is introduced to readers as her “father threw his weighted-down twelve-year-old daughter into the water…” Fortunately for Evie, her father is a colleague of Jacques Cousteau; so as Evie sinks in the water, she continues to breathe through a prototype of a newly-developed aqualung. It is 1947. We are then just as quickly introduced to a much older Evie when, “Eighty years later, on a crystalline afternoon in a calm patch of the South Pacific with the sun coming hard across the sky and nothing on any horizon but endless saline blue, a gangly ninety-two-year-old woman pitched backward over the gunwale of a five-meter dive boat and sank wakeless into the sea.”
In between 12 and 92, Evie will spend much of those eight decades in and around the oceans of the world. It is fitting because it is during the span of her lifetime that mankind will only begin to understand the diversity and vitality of life within the oceans.
At college in the 1950s, Evie participates in the oceanography program at Duke University. While her academic skills are lacking, with Jacques Cousteau in her circle of family friends, it is clear that Evie has had much more experience in the water than her male classmates. She is also very well read. In one classroom moment, Evie realizes her professor has made a number of mistakes including the power of continental drift which was then considered just a theory in need of evidence. After pointing out what a handful of scientists had begun to conclude, her professor responded, “Young lady, there is no force on Earth strong enough to move continents around. Any intelligent high school boy can tell you that.”
In an interview for graduate school in Southern California, Evie is asked, “Where do you come down on continental drift?” She knows her fate is in the hands of this man because the verdict on continental drift is still out. “The evidence is stronger every year,” she says confidently. “Those who can’t accept it are going to look foolish, by the time I’m your age.” He replies with a grin, “You think it’ll take that long?”
In Cold War America, a basic feature of planet Earth was unknown even as scientists at the same time had developed the bombs to destroy it.
Much of Evie’s experiences demonstrate her deep personal connection to the sea: “Her gangly body uncurled surprised that it worked better down here. A whole new grace came over her, confirming something she had long suspected. She had never felt at home up there, above the surface, with its noise and politics and relentless verticality. She had been made for water, gliding through a place edgeless and muffled, free of the blows that had always assaulted her in the world of air.”
During an expedition for National Geographic Magazine, Evie is filmed exploring the deep sea graveyard of a WWII naval battle. The wreckage is immense and at first looks like a scar on the sea bed; that is, until she realizes that an abundant variety of life had taken hold in sunken battleships and Japanese Zero fighter planes. The ocean had taken man’s violent tools and invigorated them with life. It was at this moment that Evie realized that she would die in the ocean. As Powers writes poetically, “She needed to be a reef.”
During preparation for another adventure, Evie was told she needed to learn how to handle the press since she would be the only woman on board. Asking why this was necessary, the answer was expressed with friendly sarcasm: “Thirty-seven young male scientists and one redheaded twenty-two-year-old, trapped at sea together for half a year? Nothing that the newspapers might be interested in.”
“It was 1957, Pepsi was offering to help the modern housewife with the hard work of staying slim,” Powers writes. “Alcoa announced a bottle cap that even a woman could open—without a knife blade, a bottle opener, or even a husband!” And Evie Beaulieu was headed down into the deep blue sea.
While on yet another expedition in 1960, Evie’s crew hears word that a submersible vessel with a small window had reached the deepest point in the ocean, Challenger Deep in the Marianas Trench, over 35,000 feet down. While the physical feat was remarkable in itself, the true revelation was what they saw out the window. “All the way down that seven-mile column,” Powers writes with wonder, “and all the way back up again, they saw life. Wild, bizarre monsters unlike anything outside of nightmares. Organisms that glowed and pulsed, that took on surreal shapes, their amorphous bodies surviving pressure greater than fifteen thousand pounds per square inch. Her whole life, Evelyne had been taught that nothing could live so far down, under such pressure, so far from sunlight. But life was never very good at obeying human logic.”
The oceans were thriving with life, “every cubic meter,” Evie pondered, and mankind had just figured it out.
I was born three months later.
We know now that while the oceans cover 71 percent of the earth’s surface, they contain 99 percent of its biosphere. Until this very recent revelation, Powers humbly confesses: “No human being knew what life on Earth really looked like. How could they? They lived on the land, in the marginal kingdom of aberrant outliers. All the forests and savannas and wetlands and deserts and grasslands on all the continents were just afterthoughts, ancillaries to the Earth’s main stage.” He concludes that we have misnamed our planet.
Just as Richard Powers observed in The Overstory that man’s time on this Earth is extraordinarily brief – if the age of Earth were condensed into a 24 hour day, man has been here only for the last four seconds – so too in Playground does he humble humanity once again, not in time but in the physical space of life on Earth itself.***
If Evie’s lifetime, and perhaps my own in some sense, represents the very recent expansion of our own understanding of the nature of life on Earth, it is, sadly, in this same single lifetime that mankind has destroyed much of what once was while posing a serious threat to all the rest.
“The coasts of Florida,” Powers writes of Evie’s first-hand observations, “had traded their mangrove forests for subdivisions and high-rises. The coral cities of the Indian Ocean that crowded with life when she swam in them in her early twenties were bleaching and filling up with sludge. Oil now spilled from rigs and ships a hundred times a year. From inside a submersible, miles down in the sunless zone, she had filmed fields of canisters filled with radioactive waste…”
There’s more: “She had seen the collapse of the infinite fisheries off the Grand Banks, observed the disappearance of snow crabs from the Bering Sea, watched miles-wide nets dredge up in one afternoon coral cities that had taken ten thousand years to grow, seen the global sea acidify, watched most of the world’s reefs bleach white, and witnessed the start of nodule mining that would rip the heart from the living deep. She had lived to see trash at the bottom of the Challenger Deep, the remotest places on Earth turned into resorts, the Gulf Stream wavering, and a photic zone [upper layer of ocean that supports photosynthesis] too hot to mix, leaving the nutrients trapped in the layers below. Nine-tenths of large life missing, and the rest filled with heavy metals. The largest part of the planet exhausted, before it was ever explored” (according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, only five percent of the world’s oceans have been explored).****
“Like everyone,I thought that the ocean was infinite and could not be harmed,” the fictional Evie writes in her book. “I was wrong. The waters are warming. The large fish are disappearing, Plastics and metals and poisons are concentrating all the way up the food chain. And the worse is yet to come…”
I was eight years-old when The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau premiered on television; what a wonderful and enriching program. I did not realize then how amazingly portentous was the choice of the show’s narrator; Rod Serling, former host of The Twilight Zone.
Writing about the woes of the world means confronting the fact that it is all of us together who have created many of these problems; depleting the Earth’s resources, polluting the air and the water, altering the Earth’s climate, and largely looking the other way when encountering news of the less-fortunate. I’ve been called out on my hypocrisy before and I replied that if anything is to move the needle back toward sanity, taking a few small steps in a healthy direction must be the place we begin. And I’ve convinced myself that writing about it amounts to one of those steps; encouraging you to read Playground by Richard Powers being another.
*My thoughts on The Overstory (2018) can be found here:
**Wikipedia page for Dr. Sylvia Earle
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sylvia_Earle
***The Oceans through Time
https://ocean.si.edu/through-time/ocean-through-time
****Ocean Exploration
