A Year with the Seals
Unlocking the Secrets of the Sea's Most Charismatic and Controversial Creatures
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
Environmental journalist Alix Morris spends an eye-opening year getting to know these elusive, intelligent creatures, investigating the effects of their extraordinary return from the brink of extinction and how we can try to bring nature back into balance.
It might be their large, strangely human eyes or their dog-like playfulness, but seals have long captured people's interest and affection, making them the perfect candidate for an environmental cause, as well as the subject of decades of study. Alix Morris spends a year with these magnetic creatures and brings them to life on the page, season by season, as she learns about their intelligence, their relationships with each other, their ecosystems, and the changing climate.
Morris also gets to know all of the competing interests in the intense debate about the newly recovered seal populations in our coastal waters, from local fishermen whose catch is often diminished by savvy seals, to tribes who once relied on seal-hunting for food, clothing, and medicine, to seal rescue workers and biologists, to surfers and swimmers now encountering seal-hunting sharks in coastal waters. A Year with the Seals is a rare look at what happens when conservation efforts actually work, and how human tampering with ecosystems continues to have unexpected consequences. But it’s also a gripping adventure story of a journalist determined to understand seals and our relationship with them for herself.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
The surprisingly complicated issues surrounding seals are thoughtfully brought forth in this balanced examination from environmental science writer Alix Morris. She spent more than a year on the Maine coast studying the marine mammals and the conflicting feelings they inspire. While most people see seals as adorable and harmless, commercial fishermen resent them for preying on valuable fish stocks and disrupting traps. Meanwhile, beachgoers worry that more seals mean more sharks. One thing made abundantly clear in Morris’ observations is that humans, by and large, are terrible at sharing space and natural resources. If seals interfere with profit or recreation, there’s no shortage of people ready to push them aside. Morris does a tremendous job detailing these tangled relationships, emphasizing that ecological balance is key—while acknowledging our long history of throwing that balance off. A Year with the Seals challenges perceptions of the animals from all sides, and in doing so, it provides a fuller picture of the species that goes far beyond their cuteness.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Science writer Morris debuts with a captivating account of traveling North America to investigate contentious debates over what to do with booming seal populations, which have rebounded in recent decades thanks to the 1972 Marine Mammal Protection Act. On the coast of Maine, Morris finds a simmering hostility to the mammals after a 2020 great white shark attack left a 63-year-old woman dead, leading locals to blame seals' return for attracting sharks that scare off vacationers from tourism-dependent beach towns. Finding fishermen to be similarly resentful, Morris recounts tagging along with Puyallup Tribal Councilman James Rideout on a crabbing expedition near Tacoma, Wash., and discusses how he blamed seal hunting bans for depleting stores of salmon, a "critical part" of Puyallup culture and identity. Morris gives equal space to the more sympathetic stance of biologists and conservationists, describing their research showing that overfishing, climate change, and pollution are the actual drivers of dwindling salmon and cod populations. Morris's evenhanded perspective eschews easy answers, finding instead a knotty parable about humanity's struggle to live within a natural world that people profoundly shape without ever achieving the absolute control they desire. Philosophical and impressively reported, this enthralls.
Customer Reviews
A Year with the Seals
A very well written book! I usually read fiction because I like to follow a story. That is what it was like reading this book. The writer interspersed stories with facts that kept me speeding through this interesting story of so much more than seals. The idea of listening to both sides of a conflict and creating solutions based on that listening - wow! What a powerful lesson!