ENVIRONMENT

OCEAN PLANET: Writings and Images of the Sea. Original text by Peter Benchley, edited by Judith Gradwohl (Abrams: $39.95; 192 pp.) This is the companion volume to the exhibition that opens this month at the National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. There’s a little bit of everything for your seafaring soul: A little lore, some nautical sayings, some Jacques-Yves Cousteau, some marine facts and some things to worry about (like sewage and oil spills and coastal development), always in the end where dessert should be. Gradwohl has collected essays and excerpts from the writings of Rachel Carson, Joseph Conrad, Loren Eiseley, John McPhee, Peter Matthiessen, Farley Mowat, Benjamin Franklin and others. The art is less distinctive, but informative, even now and then, evocative. Above, fisherman Pete Blackwell kisses the first sockeye salmon of the season before throwing it overboard in Bristol Bay, Alaska, 1991.