Laura Trethewey - The Imperiled Ocean: Human Stories from a Changing Sea

Its time to recognize that the oceans story is also our own.

Everything runs downhill to the sea, from possessiveness to poetry, from pollution to passion. The sea is fact and metaphor, mine and miracle. The Imperilled Ocean is not just a catalogue of facts but, much more, beautifully rendered stories of what happens out there and what is at stake in the inner space of our home planet.

CARL SAFINA, author of Beyond Words and Song for the Blue Ocean

Beautifully written, Tretheweys stories of the sea and the people who share a common bond with it vividly come to life. This is a must read whether or not you spend time at the sea.

DAVE EBERT, Director, Pacific Shark Research Center, Moss Landing Marine Laboratories

An exquisite tapestry of Tretheweys deeply felt personal experiences, well-researched scientific information, and intimate stories of individuals and communities rising and falling with the shifting tides. A touchstone for those seeking a better understanding of our relationship with, and responsibilities to, our earth.

GLEB RAYGORODETSKY, author of The Archipelago of Hope, winner of the Nautilus Award Grand Prize

Copyright 2020 by Laura Trethewey.

All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced or used in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher or a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). To contact Access Copyright, visit www.accesscopyright.ca or call 1-800-893-5777.

Published in the United States by Pegasus Books.

Edited by Jill Ainsley.

Interior design by Maria Fernandez.

Cover design by Faceout Studio.

Cover illustration from Shutterstock.

Printed in Canada.

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Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Title: The imperilled ocean : human stories from a changing sea / Laura Trethewey.

Names: Trethewey, Laura, author.

Description: Includes bibliographical references.

Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20190187980 | Canadiana (ebook) 20190188006 | ISBN 9781773101156 (softcover) | ISBN 9781773101163 (EPUB) | ISBN 9781773101170 (Kindle)

Subjects: LCSH: OceanSocial aspects.

Classification: LCC GC21 .T74 2020 | DDC 910.4/5dc23

Goose Lane Editions acknowledges the generous support of the Government of Canada, the Canada Council for the Arts, and the Government of New Brunswick.

Goose Lane Editions

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Fredericton, New Brunswick

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To Till

We reached this place by water. Hours ago wed left the last paved road and driven into dark rain forest, gravel boiling at our tires, thick evergreens flashing past, and stars coming out overhead. It was morning when we reached the end of the road. The forest fell away and the Pacific Ocean took centre stage. The wind freshened a few knots. The temperature dropped a few degrees. The sun hit the water and made a shimmery band on the surface, following my eye wherever I moved, like the ocean was waiting just for me.

Down by the docks, we met a wide-set man, blind in one eye, who operated a water taxi service between the end of the fire road and his hometown, a half-hour boat ride away. We climbed on board, and the driver, who introduced himself as Leo, jetted us away to Kyuquot, an unincorporated Indigenous village clinging to the shores of a channel in the rugged Pacific Northwest. On starboard, forested mountains rose majestically; on port, a spectacular, drop-off-the-edge-of-the-Earth view of wide-open ocean that caught my breath every time. I breathed in air that smelled as clean and fresh as a chopped cucumber. Nothing but ocean from here to Japan.

This ecological reserve, the traditional territory of the Kyuquot and Checleseht First Nations, appears pristine, untouched, and eye-wateringly beautiful, especially on a sunny day. I had joined a volunteer team to collect plastic on MuQwin Peninsula, a mountainous cape that sticks straight out into the ocean. Because of MuQwins geography and the year-round storms that slam in, the cape acts like a giant sieve for ocean plastic along the West Coast of North America. It has one of the most plastic-polluted shores in Canada, a country with more coastline than any other in the world.

We werent even in MuQwin yet, but I could already see evidence of a plastic hot spot onshore. Nets, foam, bottles, fishing buoys, flip-flops, tennis balls a mere scintilla of the eight million metric tons of plastic that leak from land to sea every year strewed the coastline. This lonely place with a few scattered villages might feel distant, faraway, and untouched by the wider world, but the garbage washing in told a global story: sea-ravaged labels come in Japanese, Danish, Turkish, Taiwanese, and Greek.

It wasnt always this way. Leo remembered how the ocean once served as his towns dump. Most of his life Kyuquot had no money to pay for garbage collection, and the towns waste ran from land to sea, just as it still does in many developing countries around the world. Leo tried to attract media attention by focusing on the leatherback turtle, a giant of a reptile that migrates all the way from Indonesia to feed in the jellyfish-rich waters of the Pacific Northwest. Instead they feasted on plastic bags that float hypnotically through the water looking just like the turtles prey. A few years ago, the town cleaned up the inlet when an outsider helped introduce a garbage pickup service. The water finally cleared, but now waste was flowing in from a whole new front: the open ocean.

This story about a village by the sea, a complicated past behind it, a challenging future ahead, is like so many stories Ive heard about the ocean. The details shift, and so do the winners and losers, but the theme of unavoidable change is omnipresent, change so deep and wide-reaching that it is beyond the ken of any single person and raises a larger question for me: what is going on out at sea?

The poet Anne Stevenson once wrote, The sea is as near as we come to another world. I feel the truth of these words when diving in the ocean, listening to the fragile in-and-out of my breath against the vast silence of the sea, watching the watery murkiness resolve into a new world so unlike my own. And when I read stories about copulating sea slugs with thorny penises, or camera-harnessed beluga whales suspected of Russian espionage, or of an offshore sailor in the Indian Ocean watching a fireball fall from the night sky, claiming to have witnessed the last moments of missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370, I feel like I am poring over alien transmissions from another planet. Something huge and shadowy and important is going on out there in the lifeblood of this planet, the worlds greatest ecosystem, the hidden force behind infrastructure, weather, and our daily small talk about the weather. The watery surface is a place of transit and trade; the sea floor a place of connection, finance, communication, and untold riches. All these unfathomable connections lead to a greater story of change just beyond the horizon.

Stories about the sea are different. The stakes are higher, the sacrifices dearer, and the rewards richer for those who risk crossing the water. The people who are out on the ocean every day know its life better than anyone else, people of all races, motivations, and professions who have the most up-to-date insight into the last great mystery here on Earth. In 2015, I set out on an extended listening tour to find out what people were doing in this vast space that we know so little about. I started with a simple question: what do people want from the ocean? I was drawn to refugees crossing the Mediterranean on barely seaworthy boats; to cruise ship workers disappearing overboard; to hobby sailors cruising off into storms; to a cinematographer shooting underwater scenes for blockbuster movies; to a water-dwelling community fighting eviction; and to a biologist tracking an ancient species that was being erased from the water. I was curious about how someones stature affected success at sea; how larger constructs, like laws, nationality, storytelling, and science, worked on water. I had a suspicion that the unbelievable stories that drifted back to land ran much deeper, caused by a friction between natural and man-made rules. The only way to find out if I was right was to talk to people, to hear stories of what they were experiencing. Only then might I begin to piece together the larger story of a changing ocean. Each person I met along the journey gave me insight into a question that turned out to be anything but simple.