But we’re also terrified of it. Almost every culture has a flood myth of some kind, and our entertainment plays on this with films such as the Poseidon Adventure, Waterworld and Titanic. For much of our history, our response to this fear has been to try to control the marine environment and manage its impact on us. We resort to ‘hard engineering’ – dams, sea walls, dredged channels – in an effort to tame the wildness of the ocean. But Johnston argues these endeavours are ultimately doomed to fail. “The sea has a habit of taking back its own.”

Instead, Johnston is advocating for ‘blue engineering’ – the marine version of the ‘green engineering’ movement on land that has seen nations like Singapore reclaiming the walls and roofs of the concrete jungle with plant life.

Blue engineering isn’t just some hippie ideal; it’s a blunt necessity. We are encroaching further and further into the marine environment – 60% of China’s mainland coastline is built upon, Indonesia has plans for an enormous sea wall to protect Jakarta, and our oceans are dotted with thousands of oil rigs and offshore wind turbines with ever more being planned and built.

But this new land-grab risks doing irreparable harm to marine environments and ecosystems. These are the ecosystems that nourish the fish and marine species that constitute 16% of global animal protein intake, that are home to underwater forests as essential to the marine world as the Amazon is to the terrestrial biosphere, and which make our coastlines such wondrous and attractive places to spend time in.

“We’re loving the sea to death,” Johnston says. “We’re not been thinking about design of structures with respect to ecology.”

For example, structures such as piers create shade, which reduces algal growth and can make it easier for invasive species to take root, and changes the interactions between predators and their prey. Bright lights at night confuse species such as turtles that use moonlight to navigate. Constructions designed to slow down the flow of water and reduce wave energy can have the unintended effect of trapping contaminants. Many of these structures also rely on anti-fouling treatments to stop them from being clogged up by marine invertebrates, but these biocides can have a host of other impacts well beyond their immediate target.