Making waves | 25 June 2011

The title Her Deepness is partly satirical, partly reverential. The woman herself, Sylvia Earle, is an American oceanographer and a global campaigner for maritime preservation. She dropped into London last week to collect a medal from the Royal Geographical Society and her visit coincided with a month-long promotion at Selfridges in Oxford Street. The shop decked itself out in deep-sea livery to alert us all to the perils of overfishing. Frogmen patrolled the escalators. Kids cavorted on whale-rides. Cardboard silhouettes of leaping marlin dangled from the ceilings. The shop windows were blazoned with slogans intended to foster alarm. ‘For every shrimp caught, ten other lives are lost.’ ‘In the blink of an eye sea-life could be extinct.’ I’m due to meet Her Deepness in the Ultralounge, which sounds like a private club where film stars inject heroin but turns out to be a cosy little lecture-room in the basement, halfway between Kitchenware and Luggage.