NEW YORK, JUNE 8, 2004 — On World Oceans Day, Four Walls Eight Windows is publishing a new book, Beyond the Outer Shores by freelance writer Eric Enno Tamm, that reveals that the scientific research of legendary ecologist Ed Ricketts — fictionalized as the ‘Doc’ of John Steinbeck’s Cannery Row — was an “early warning” to the ecological destruction of the world’s oceans.

Beyond the Outer Shores chronicles the friendship between Steinbeck and Ricketts, and their attempts to complete an ecological trilogy of the Pacific, stretching from the Baja to the Bering Sea. It was one of the greatest scientific investigations of a coastline ever attempted in the world at the time. Some 20 marine organisms today bear the species name rickettsi or steinbecki, in honor of both men’s contribution to Pacific Coast ecology.

“His ecological approach and ethic, and especially his warnings about the excesses of humanity’s material pursuit and technological mania, have become more relevant than ever to a generation now waking to full environmental consciousness,” Tamm writes of Ed Ricketts.

“[A]t a time when our oceans are in crisis because of pollution, coastal development and the loss of our fisheries, the pioneering conservation work of Ed Ricketts was an early warning about the fragile web of life beneath the sea,” says Leon E. Panetta, former White House Chief of Staff to Bill Clinton and Chair of the Pew Oceans Commission, in an endorsement of Beyond the Outer Shores. “This book is another compelling reminder of our responsibility to protect that remarkable resource.”

In 1939, Ed Ricketts published Between Pacific Tides about America’s Pacific Coast and in 1941 he and Steinbeck coauthored Sea of Cortez about their historic scientific expedition to the Gulf of California. At the time of Ricketts’ untimely death in 1948, the two men were planning to coauthor a “northern sequel” covering British Columbia and Alaska titled The Outer Shores. It was never completed.

“Tamm is rescuing Ed Ricketts from the myth that has grown up around ‘Doc,’ the character in Steinbeck’s Cannery Row. And he is giving us a more accurate account of Ricketts’ true heroic journey: as a man of science, who had his finger on the pulse of the planet,” says Jon Christensen, writer and coordinator of the Sea of Cortez Expedition and Education Project, which just returned from retracing Steinbeck and Ricketts’ historic voyage to Mexico.

“[Ricketts] diagnosed the fate of the environment and humanity, and offered humbling advice that we have failed to heed and only now are beginning to hear,” adds Christensen.

Ed Ricketts was one of the strongest voices of conservation in Monterey’s sardine industry. In 1947, he published one of the most in-depth scientific studies of the sardine, applying an ecological methodology to understand why the fishery collapsed so spectacularly. He died in 1948 after his car was struck by a train on Cannery Row.