John Jeremiah Sullivan: “Always wanted to write about surfing”

Matteo Pericoli drawing's for The Paris Review illustrating a recent blog post by John Jeremiah Sullivan

From KQED:
You’ve written about everything from Michael Jackson to Hurricane Katrina to touring with Guns ‘n’ Roses to an 18th-century German who worked to unite Native Americans against colonialism. Is there a subject you’ve always wanted to write about, but haven’t had the chance?

John Jeremiah Sullivan: Always wanted to write about surfing.

—Sullivan’s Pulphead was one of the most acclaimed books from last year. This essay from the book, which was published in GQ, might be of interest.

An excerpt:

As the planet warms, evolution speeds. We’ve known this for a long time. You learn it in college biology. Things evolve faster nearer the equator. Heat speeds up molecular activity. You have a population of squid—it divides. One branch hangs out up by Alaska, the other goes down to the coast of Peru. Go and visit them 50,000 years later. The group up by Alaska is slowly subdividing into two species. The one down by Peru has turned into twenty-six species and is no longer even recognizable. Well, these days the whole planet is experiencing that effect. More heat, more light. The animals are doing things differently; they’re showing up places they’re not supposed to go, sleeping at different times, eating different things. Talk with any fieldworker and it’s a truism that the guidebooks are becoming obsolete at ten times the speed. As a researcher told the BBC in 2001, “There is a genetic change in their response to daylight. We can detect this change over as short a time period as five years. Evolution is happening and it is happening very fast.” And he was only talking about a particular species of mosquito…

This entry was posted on Friday, May 25th, 2012 at 8:00 am. It is filed under Creative Culture, Surfing, Sustainability. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.