What the Wild Sea Can Be, Helen Scales
What the Wild Sea Can Be, Helen Scales
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What the Wild Sea Can Be
The Future of the World’s Ocean

Author: Helen Scales

Narrator: Helen Scales

Unabridged: 11 hr 45 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 11/05/2024

Synopsis

No matter where we live, "we are all ocean people," Helen Scales emphatically observes in her bracing yet hopeful exploration of the future of the ocean. Beginning with its fascinating deep history, Scales shows how the prehistoric ocean ecology was already working in ways similar to the ocean of today. In elegant, evocative prose, she takes listeners into the realms of animals that epitomize today's increasingly challenging conditions. Ocean life everywhere is on the move as seas warm, and warm waters are an existential threat to emperor penguins, whose mating grounds in Antarctica are collapsing. Shark populations—critical to balanced ecosystems—have shrunk by 71 percent since the 1970s, largely the result of massive and oft-unregulated industrial fishing. Orcas—the apex predators—have also drastically declined, victims of toxic chemicals and plastics with long half-lives that disrupt the immune system and the ability to breed.

Offering innovative ideas for protecting coastlines and cleaning the toxic seas, Scales insists we need more ethical and sustainable fisheries and must prevent the other existential threat of deep-sea mining, which could significantly alter life on earth. Inspiring us all to maintain a sense of awe and wonder at the majesty beneath the waves, she urges us to fight for the better future that still exists for the Anthropocene ocean.

About Helen Scales

Helen Scales, PhD, is a marine biologist, writer, and public broadcaster. She is the author of Spirals in Time: The Secret Life and Curious Afterlife of Seashells and Eye of the Shoal: A Fishwatcher's Guide to Life, the Ocean, and Everything. She has written for National Geographic, the Guardian, New Scientist, BBC Wildlife Magazine, and BBC Focus, among others, and also presents the Earth Unscrewed podcast. She teaches marine biology and science writing at Cambridge University and advises the marine conservation charity Sea Changers. She divides her time between Cambridge, England, and the French coast of Finistere.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Hannah on March 26, 2025

Hopeful but not the urgent cry for action I expected.🐠 "I hope this book will offer an antidote to the rising tide of eco-anxiety and fears for the future of the planet." Biologist Helen Scales opens What the Wild Sea Can Be by saying that she's about to swing readers back and forth through time. And......more

Goodreads review by Moonkiszt on March 09, 2025

Helen Scales, enthusiastic, earnest and with a warning prophetic tone has slipped What the Wild Sea Can Be: The Future of the World's Ocean onto our bookshelves. Within the covers of this read she goes from shark populations to kelp forests, from the Artic ecosystem to Antarctica's. She looks int......more

Goodreads review by Keely on May 15, 2024

In What the Wild Sea Can Be, Helen Scales shares a comprehensive look at the challenges facing the ocean today, from climate change, to pollution and overfishing. This exploration is starkly honest about the damage humans have already done (and are still doing) to marine life and habitats. And yet,......more

Goodreads review by Madeline on July 30, 2024

Rating: 4.5 stars So amazingly written! I was immediately pulled in, it doesn’t read as a dry academic text as some science books can. There were parts in the middle that started to slump a little, in part because of my burnout but also because the science info could become a little heavy. A look at t......more

Goodreads review by Melanie on February 16, 2025

This wouldn't be a subject I would normally read about, but I'm glad I did as it educated me about some important issues. This book made me very sad, though it offers hope. Going beyond the headlines it was shocking how much beautiful marine nature is being damaged by human greed and carelessness. T......more

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