Foreword by Philippe Cousteau

 The ocean has been a part of my life for as long as I can remember. But my earliest memories of the ocean are not my own. They are my grandfather's and father’s, images from the films and books that chronicled their adventures around the world. Though I never knew my father, he died 6 months before I was born, my grandfather shared with me the wonders of his adventures through countless bedtime stories. I tell you this because it matters to how I read the book in your hands. SILENT SEAS is also a story handed down, from Rachel Carson's SILENT SPRING to our own silent seas, and inheritance is exactly the right way to think about it. Because while we have inherited a diminished ocean, it is not a given that we should, in turn, pass the same on to our children.

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I have spent my career trying to help people feel what I felt the first time I understood, really understood, that the ocean is more than just blue water and pretty fish. It produces roughly half the oxygen in the air you just breathed. It feeds close to a billion people who have no reliable alternative. It regulates the climate and thus determines the weather rhythms that affect every country on Earth, even those that have never once thought about tides. And it is being taken apart, piece by piece, by forces most people never see: trawlers stripping a seafloor bare in an afternoon, a chemistry shift so severe that scientists now call it the osteoporosis of the ocean, a tide of plastic that I have personally found inside the stomachs of birds that starved with their bellies full.​ But stats and figures fail to elicit the kind of response the crisis deserves.

 

What SILENT SEAS does and does well is to put a human face on every one of those forces, the way the best books about loss always do, and it refuses to let the reader treat any of it as background noise. But more than illustrate a crisis, this book does not leave the reader stranded in grief. I am asked constantly whether there is still hope for the ocean, and my answer has not changed in twenty years: absolutely. I see the hope most clearly in the young people I work with who are already restoring the ecosystems they were handed in far worse condition than they deserved. Restoring, not merely sustaining, because sustaining a wound is not the same as healing it. SILENT SEAS belongs in that same tradition. It does not ask you to mourn the ocean. It asks you to join the people already working to restore abundance to the ocean, and it gives you, chapter by chapter, exactly what you need to understand why that work is possible and why it cannot wait any longer.

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