by Alanna Mitchell ~ McClelland & StewartWhen Alanna Mitchell set out to write a book about the oceans of the world, she was unclear where to start. “ It is such a huge topic,” she said, “and the concepts are vast. I expected to write it in chunks, but it changed organically as I researched it.” Mitchell’s new book, Sea Sick: The Global Ocean in Crisis, is a call to arms that we can ignore at our peril. There is one thing that becomes clear when reading it, a thing that scientists around the world repeat over and over in different words and ways - the oceans of the world are one, and it can live without us, but we cannot live without the ocean. “The vital signs of this critical medium of life are showing clear signs of distress.” Some scientists believe that the ocean is dying.
Mitchell traveled the world talking to these scientists, men and women who spend their lives researching and studying the ocean, both in and out of it. They uniformly believe the ocean is sick and getting sicker. Indeed, there are some who believe that we are fast reaching a tipping point, that place where systems stop trying to repair themselves and begin the process of shutting down. “I had been thinking about vital signs,” said Mitchell. “Then I met Tim Flannery (an Australian ecologist and author). He said it looked like I was cataloging the death of a system.”
Sea Sick is the first book to examine the current state of the world’s oceans, a body of water that regulates our climate and provides most of the world’s oxygen. Mitchell does this thoughtfully and methodically, and because she is a award winning environmental reporter and not a scientist, she has written a very readable and accessible book. The clarity of her writing causes the reader many ‘EUREKA!’ moments as understanding dawns. These moments make for thoughtful walks and impassioned dinner convewrsation.
Mitchell managed to have a lot of fun while writing Sea Sick. She went snorkeling on the Great Barrier Reef, attended a coral spawn on a boat in the dawn of a Caribbean morning, and went deeper than any journalist has ever gone in a submersible, trembling with fear in an isolated back compartment while the scientist who was ‘driving’ read a novel. “ It was terrifying,” she said. “I was a wreck, before and during. I was in a dark cramped space and the intercom didn’t work. I always like a plan B and there was no Plan B.”
Mitchell’s research took her to far flung countries, following leads and suggestions as she gathered information and data from scientists and their research studies. “Scientists,” she says, “all work in isolation on their own part of the puzzle. No one participates in the big picture - there is a holistic piece missing.” Sea Sick puts those pieces together.
Traveling the globe made Sea Sick an expensive book to write. “I made a deal with the researchers and scientists that I would pay my costs,” she said. “I wrote and sold magazine articles and got a grant from Canada Council. I did it on the cheap, people I met billeted me. Sometimes I worked as crew and spent long hours with scientists - no email! They were very generous with their time. They want people to ask questions, they want to tell their stories. They were uniformly fabulous.”
In Halifax, she found Boris Worm, whose work at Dalhousie University calculates present and future populations of fish in the sea. He believes we are at an exceptional point in time, that we are “at the stage of losing the ability of things to come back on their own . . . That would represent a threshold, he said.”
In spite of the gravity of her topic, Mitchell’s clear writing flows with a softening humour. “The coral,” she writes, “was frankly hard to bond with. It is the most urgently endangered group of life known in the world.” For those that want proof or more scientific theory, there is an excellent bibliography.
China is a key player in all of this, Mitchell believes. It is a country big enough to already feel the impact of climate change, a country where ‘water quality is appalling and glaciers are in retreat’. But China is developing muscular environmental policies. A recent article in the China Daily says, “In China . . . the conservation of energy and other resources (is) of paramount importance. It indicates just how civilized a country really is.” Perhaps all is not yet lost. Perhaps we can follow China’s example and show just how civilized we are.
Alanna Mitchell is an environmental reporter and author. She was named the best environmental reporter in the world in 2000, by Reuters Foundation, and has won international awards for her work. She lives in Toronto and is working on her next book.
