Seasick: Ocean Change and the Extinction of Life on Earth
By Alanna Mitchell
The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL. $25.00, hardcover, 176 pages, ISBN 978-0-226-53258-5 (2009).
Sea Sick: The Global Ocean in Crisis
By Alanna Mitchell
Emblem Editions, an imprint of McClelland & Stewart, Toronto, ON. $19.99, paperback, 240 pages, ISBN 978-0-7710-6117-2 (2010).
Reviewed by Lee Bumsted
The global ocean is sick, and getting sicker every day. If it was a hospital patient, doctors would be worriedly hovering over the monitors attached to it and making plans to move it to the ICU.
Environmental journalist Alanna Mitchell went to nine locations around the world to sample the health of the ocean and talk with researchers working at each site. In “Seasick,” she uses these examples to illustrate the rapidly accelerating changes in the sea.
Mitchell travelled to such places as the bleached-out coral reefs of the Caribbean and the enormous oxygen-depleted dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico. At each location, scientists shared their findings and theories with her about the ocean’s condition. The results and projections are disheartening.
Mitchell notes that the ocean is an unknown entity for most people, yet it comprises 99 percent of the living space on our planet. She describes it as “our main life-support system.”
We have assumed it to be a resilient resource and not given sufficient consideration to our impacts on it. Yet through our current actions, “we are altering not just bits of the sea with dreadful oil spills or eroding shores or vast extinctions of fish, but the whole, interconnected global system that is the ocean, the main medium of life on earth,” she writes. “As goes the ocean, so goes life.”
She describes how we have been altering the fundamental chemistry of the ocean through practices such as burning fossil fuels and cutting down forests. She states that about a third of the extra carbon dioxide we have released into the atmosphere has been absorbed by the ocean. The pH of the sea, which had been very stable over time, is becoming markedly more acidic as a result. And when its chemistry changes, what can live in the ocean also changes.
Our negative influence on the ocean doesn’t stop at the water’s edge—this is about more than losing a major source of food. Mitchell tells of the plankton that produce half the oxygen we breathe, and their susceptibility to changes in habitat. She describes how an altered ocean may lead to climate patterns that cause significant destruction on land and loss of human life.
Mitchell does an admirable job of clearly explaining mechanisms of climate change. She says that we may reach an environmental tipping point, and it could come sooner than expected, as the rate of change can be compounded. She writes that the ocean contains the “switch of life” and we have our collective hand on that switch.
Some of her keenest observations are about human behavior. She describes our reluctance to address the human causes of climate change despite the wealth of evidence that immediate intervention is required.
“We have, it seems to me, harbored the convenient fiction that somehow human ingenuity will make everything all right, that we are destined to survive, that we will pull a technological rabbit out of the hat,” she says. We hope “the planetary systems will somehow right themselves” as we blissfully continue to ignore our responsibility for the degraded ocean and atmosphere.
Alanna Mitchell is a Toronto resident who has been writing on environmental topics for many years, including a stint at The Globe and Mail. “Seasick,” her second book, was recently awarded the 2010 Grantham Prize for Excellence in Reporting on the Environment.
While it can be dispiriting — even frightening — to read “Seasick,” it does contain a compelling call to action. Mitchell says we need to make far-reaching adjustments to our relationship with the earth. “Ocean change is extremely serious, but we have some power to halt or reverse it if we alter our actions rapidly, profoundly, and en masse,” she concludes. “The future is in our hands.”
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