In Pursuit of Giants
One Man's Global Search for the Last of the Great Fish
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
For millennia the great fish—marlin, bluefin tuna, and swordfish—have reigned over the world’s oceans and awed human beings. Naturalists, photographers, sportfishermen, and writers from Zane Grey to Ernest Hemingway have been inspired by their beauty, power, and sheer size. But like much other marine life today, these fish face perilous reductions in their populations due to destructive and illegal fishing, inept fisheries management practices, and dramatic changes in ocean ecology, including those wrought by climate change. In Pursuit of Giants is a moving elegy and a call to arms for the protection of these creatures, as well as a five-year, 75,000-mile global adventure story that takes author Matt Rigney on a quest to discover how once-thriving species are now threatened. Rigney’s pilgrimage to encounter these giants takes him from the sportfishing mecca of Cabo San Lucas, to the Great Barrier Reef, from New Zealand to Nova Scotia, Japan and the Mediterranean, as he joins commercial and sport fishermen, marine biologists, fish-farming pioneers, and ocean activists to investigate the dangers these species face, and the various efforts being made—or not—to protect them.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
An avid fisherman, Rigney provides a glorious read in his examination of sportfishing and the imperiled state of ocean life. The vivid immediacy of this call to action ranges from majestic descriptions of a marlin's oceanic journey and a Japanese fisherman's outrage at government-industry collusion to fishing fleets' devastation of marine life. Arguing that the extinction of much ocean life is highly possible within decades, Rigney's passionate advocacy of conservationist ethics is imbued with direct experience and eschews simplistic bromides. As he claims that sportfishers can help sustain an economy and act as a pro-conservation force, he notes that partial successes in reversing the depletion of marine life cannot offset the impact of commercial overfishing, indiscriminate slaughter of bycatch, and dishonest reporting of catch and evasion of regulations. Portraits of traditional swordfish harpooners and their empathy for the fish they harvest act as a foil to impersonal large-scale fishing, and grant depth to the profession: "The opportunity to experience ocean wilderness and explore what it means to be human... is why many venture out on the sea in pursuit of giants." The "awe and humility" felt in the presence of these fish is sensitively and powerfully wrought throughout this dramatic, transcendental tale.
