>>The sea was fluid and constantly in movement; it was indivisible, unoccupiable, inexhaustible, indeed unalterable for better or worse via human activity.

The last two properties — "inexhaustible, indeed unalterable" — have certainly turned out to be completely false as human activity scales up exponentially. and for better or worse turns out to be mostly worse, as we have fish populations crashing to near-extinction levels, garbage patches the size of smll continents... The impending breaking of the global food web may be more of an impending threat than climate change, and that's a rolling catastrophe