The Unnatural History of the Sea

The Unnatural History of the Sea by Callum Roberts

Humanity can make short work of the oceans creatures. In 1741, hungry explorers discovered herds of Steller s sea cow in the Bering Strait, and in less than thirty years, the amiable beast had been harpooned into extinction. It s a classic story, but a key fact is often omitted. Bering Island was the last redoubt of a species that had been decimated by hunting and habitat loss years before the
explorers set sail.
As Callum M. Roberts reveals in The Unnatural History of the Sea, the oceans bounty didn t disappear overnight. While today s fishing industry is ruthlessly efficient, intense exploitation began not in the modern era, or even with the dawn of industrialization, but in the eleventh century in medieval Europe. Roberts explores this long and colorful history of commercial fishing, taking readers around the world and through the centuries to witness the transformation of the seas.
Drawing on firsthand accounts of early explorers, pirates, merchants, fishers, and travelers, the book recreates the oceans of the past: waters teeming with whales, sea lions, sea otters, turtles, and giant fish. The abundance of marine life described by fifteenth century seafarers is almost unimaginable today, but Roberts both brings it alive and artfully traces its depletion. Collapsing fisheries, he shows, are simply the latest chapter in a long history of unfettered commercialization of the seas.
The story does not end with an empty ocean. Instead, Roberts describes how we might restore the splendor and prosperity of the seas through smarter management of our resources and some simple restraint. From the coasts of Florida to New Zealand, marine reserves have fostered spectacular recovery of plants and animals to levels not seen in a century. They prove that history need not repeat itself: we can leave the oceans richer than we found them.

Callum Roberts is the author of The Unnatural History of the Sea, a Washington Post Book of the Year and winner of the Rachel Carson Environment Book Award. Professor of marine conservation at the University of York. He has appeared in several documentaries, including America Before Columbus and The End of the Line, and is a board member of Seaweb, a U.S.-based environmental group. He lives in England.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9781597261029
ISBN 10	1597261025
Title	The Unnatural History of the Sea
Author	Callum Roberts
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Hardback
Publisher	Island Press
Year published	2007-08-01
Number of pages	452
Prizes	Commended for Independent Publisher Book Awards (Environment) 2008
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.
Note	Unavailable