1st Place: 2008 Rachel Carson Environment Book Award
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 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 colourful history of commercial fishing and hunting, 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 travellers, 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 commercialisation of the seas.
The story does not end with an empty ocean. Instead, Roberts describes how we might restore the splendour 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. Hardcover, Island Press, 2007, ISBN-13: 978-1-59726-102-9
Read the SEJournal review by Christine Heinrichs.
Rachel Carson Environment Book category Judges' comments:
Callum Roberts has written one of those books that you tell your friends about shortly after you've read it. One could imagine that a history of fishing might make ponderous going, but Roberts is such a skilled writer and he tackles a complicated subject so well that the reader is pulled along easily. In The Unnatural History of the Sea, he entertains us with fascinating tales of explorers, whalers, fishermen and even pirates, and his words bring even the lowliest forms of marine organisms to life. You can't love what you don't know, and Roberts teaches us to know and love the oceans and everything that inhabits them. We decided that this book, with its striking depth and breadth, stands out for its storytelling, its research, and for its potential to bring this important subject to a wide audience. And although Roberts describes the disastrous state of the oceans, from the death of coral reefs to the collapse of Chesapeake Bay, he gives us hope that it's not too late to save them. At the end of this book, he reminds us of the throngs of salmon swimming in Alaskan estuaries, the packs of hammerheads circling the Galapagos and the "mighty boils of tuna" in the Humboldt Current, all "remnants of the seas of long ago." "There are still places in the world . . .," Roberts wrote, "where it is possible to find something of the miraculous in nature." In the spirit of Rachel Carson, who sounded an alarm that drove the world to action, we award Callum Roberts' The Unnatural History of the Sea SEJ's first annual book award. Here's the video of Callum Roberts' acceptance speech from Japan.
Honorable Mention: 2008 Rachel Carson Environment Book Award
Alan Weisman
Thomas Dunne Books, a division of St. Martin's Press
The World Without Us
In The World Without Us, Alan Weisman offers an utterly original approach to questions of humanity's impact on the planet: he asks us to envision our Earth, without us.
In this far-reaching narrative, Weisman explains how our massive infrastructure would collapse and finally vanish without human presence; what of our everyday stuff may become immortalized as fossils; how copper pipes and wiring would be crushed into mere seams of reddish rock; why some of our earliest buildings might be the last architecture left; and how plastic, bronze sculpture, radio waves, and some man-made molecules may be our most lasting gifts to the universe.
Rachel Carson Environment Book category Judges' comments:
The World Without Us had a fascinating premise: What would the Earth be like if all humans disappeared? And Alan Weisman executes it superbly, drawing on science and engineering as a basis for his rich and detailed scenarios without falling into the trap of writing a book that sounds like science fiction. He transports us to exotic places, from Africa's pesticide-laden Lake Naivasha to the collapsing New York subway. And he ponders what happens to our brain waves long after we are gone. His is one of the most imaginative environmental books to come out in some time, and it will reach a wide audience.
Honorable Mention: 2008 Rachel Carson Environment Book Award
Peter Heller
Free Press
The Whale Warriors
Rachel Carson Environment Book category Judges' comments:
The Whale Warriors is a well-written adventure yarn with a strong central character in Paul Watson, the commander-in-chief of the Sea Shepherds. Peter Heller takes extra steps, however, and does his reporting homework in fleshing out the story of Watson's aggressive campaign against Japanese whalers in the southern oceans. Important information on the background of whaling and the politics of fishing for the world's largest mammals are woven into the story.
