Cunningham - Ocean country: one womans voyage from peril to hope in her quest to save the seas

Praise for Ocean Country

Cunningham has searched and found a powerful response to one of the greatest questions of our time from the deepest part of herself and expressed it with eloquence and wit and discernment, taking the reader along with her for a marvelous ride into a greater state of awareness.

SUSAN MURPHY, author of Minding the Earth, Mending the World

Ocean Country is a book about the art of the possible. How it is possible to protect the planets glorious richness of sea-lives and the life of fisherfolk? How can we harvest the sea without emptying it? How is it possible to bear the oceanic consequences of run-away carbon catastrophe? How is it possible to write a book that both celebrates and informs, calling us to respond with hearts and minds to the crises of the life-sustaining seas? In her book of underwater adventures, Liz Cunningham shows us how.

KATHLEEN DEAN MOORE, author of Great Tide Rising

Better than any book Ive read recently, Ocean Country captures both the dilemma faced by every individual in a world that has lost touch with natureHow can I be part of the solution instead of being part of the problem?and the only rational responseto re-establish your personal connection with it and with like-minded people wherever you live. Liz Cunninghams journey is remarkable not only in itself, but because it also symbolizes, and summarizes important aspects of the journeys of everyone concerned about the fate of our planet. Truly, we all live in Ocean Country.

NORMAN MACLEOD, author of The Great Extinctions

How were changing the oceansand can fix themcan seem all too abstract, until you read Liz Cunninghams powerful story. She takes you inside her heart as she witnesses a huge coral reef go from vibrantly and colorfully alive to bleached white death over just a few days, and as she feels the splendor of swimming with whales. Her message comes through loud and clear: through our individual actions, each doing what we can, we can nurture the seas we all depend upon, and where weve already damaged them, we can nurse them back to health.

ANTHONY BARNOSKY, author of Dodging Extinction

What a journey this isboth personal and planetary! These are the kinds of stories we need right now because they help us move from despair to hope. Ocean Country will change the way we look at the seas.

MARY EVELYN TUCKER, co-coordinator of the Yale University Forum on Religion and Ecology and coauthor of Journey of the Universe

Liz Cunningham takes us on a journey from the Turks and Caicos to the California coastline, to the Mediterranean, and onto the Coral Triangle of the west Pacific. We observe amazing creatures, explore unique habitats and ecosystems, and learn a fair amount of history and science. But the real reward of our adventures is the heightened appreciation we attain for the wonder and beauty, yet fragility, of the worlds oceans. We recognize just why we must fight to defend them against the twin threats of heating and acidification caused by our ongoing burning of fossil fuels. If you were looking for another reason to take action to defend our oceans against ongoing environmental assaults, then Ocean Country will provide it.

MICHAEL MANN, director of the Pennsylvania State University Earth Systems Science Center and author of Dire Predictions

The ocean is medicine. Thats what Liz Cunninghams book shows us. It describes the winding, unpredictable neurological cascades that happen when we connect deeply with our waterways. We experience awe, wonder, purpose, insight, calm, excitement, solitude, romance, empathy, creativity. We become advocates, warriors, custodians, fixers, championswe become unstoppable. In Ocean Country we meet people where they are as they heal and are reminded how much we all need such healing now.

WALLACE J. NICHOLS, author of Blue Mind

If a pilgrimage is a transformative journey to a sacred place, which I believe it is, Cunninghams quest is a tale of sacred travel at a threshold point in human history. While the oceans are in peril we have it within our power to save them if we humbly recognize our reliance on them and truly experience their miraculous beauty.

PHIL COUSINEAU, author of The Art of Pilgrimage

For those who think the oceans are too vast, too remote for us to irreversibly delete their biodiversity, Ocean Country, is a sharp rejoinder. In her very personal account, Cunningham shows how we attack the oceans species on every front. Biodiversity matters she tells usand provides compelling firsthand accounts of why.

STUART PIMM, author of The World According to Pimm

A vivid picture of Earths ocean biodiversity. This is a beautiful book that will make you go do something about preserving that diversity for future generations.

MARK WILLIAMS, coauthor of Ocean Worlds

The wreckage we humans have caused in the ocean is monumental and dispiriting, its seeming inevitability enough to sadden and immobilize compassionate people whove come to feel theres no longer any meaningful way for them as individuals to help. Liz Cunningham faces this tragedy unflinchingly and, working painstakingly through her own personal loss, finds healing and hope in the sea. Bringing us to places of continued abundance and fertilityan Indonesian reef sparkling with life, a fishery restored through a collaboration of fishermen and scientists, a humpback whale nursery where mothers gently tend their calvesher stories are oases of hope, shimmering with the possibility of restoration for the larger, life-giving sea.

DEBORAH CRAMER, author of The Narrow Edge

Twenty-one percent of author royalties will be donated to conservation organizations. This amount was chosen to highlight the fact that the percentage of oxygen in each breath we take is twenty-one percent and more than one half of that oxygen comes from marine plants and algae in the ocean.