ABOUT SILENT SEAS
"If Rachel Carson were still alive,
she would have written this book."
~ John R Childress
More than sixty years after Rachel Carson's groundbreaking book Silent Spring forced a world to confront how toxic pesticides and chemicals were destroying life on land, Silent Seas turns that same unflinching lens on the growing ocean crisis. The seas cover 70 percent of the planet and sustain all life on land, yet they are being emptied, poisoned, and reengineered faster than most of us realize. This book is the story of our dying oceans, and the case for a different ending. Silent Seas is a human story based on real events and current ocean science.
Across three parts, Silent Seas traces the machinery of the ocean crises: overfishing that has collapsed stock after stock, bottom trawling that flattens seafloor ecosystems and releases carbon buried for millennia, a tide of plastic trash large enough to be seen from space, and a warming, acidifying ocean that is quietly rewriting the rules of survival for nearly everything living in it. And all are negatively impacting human wellbeing.
Silent Seas tells the stories of the people impacted, from Gulf Coast shrimpers to West African fishing families to a Hawaiian holiday from hell for a family of four. As Dr. Kailani Vance and her graduate students at Stanford’s Hopkins Marine Station delve deeper into the mechanisms of the crisis, they also find solutions.
But will the world listen before it’s too late?
This is not a book that leaves readers stranded in despair. Its final chapters make the case, backed by evidence, for what a recovered ocean could be like: a High Seas Treaty finally moving toward enforcement, satellites that track and identify illegal fishing fleets, how removing invasive rats from islands improves community health, helps seabird colonies and coral reefs rebound. And the establishment of marine protected areas that are already proving nature can rebound when given time and protection. Silent Seas asks readers to see the ocean the way Rachel Carson once asked them to see the land: clearly, urgently, with real solutions, and in time to act.