Download Unnatural History of the Sea AudioBook Free
Humanity can make short work of the oceans’ animals. In 1741, hungry explorers uncovered herds of Steller’s sea cow in the Bering Strait, and in under thirty years, the amiable beast have been harpooned into extinction. It’s a classic story, but an integral fact is often omitted. Bering Island was the previous redoubt of an species that had been decimated by hunting and habitat reduction years before the
explorers set sail.
As Callum M. Roberts uncovers in The Unnatural Record of the Sea, the oceans’ bounty didn’t fade away overnight. While today’s angling industry is ruthlessly useful, intense exploitation commenced not in the present day era, or even with the dawn of industrialization, but in the eleventh century in middle ages European countries. Roberts explores this long and brilliant background of commercial angling, taking readers surrounding the world and through the ages to witness the transformation of the seas.
Drawing on firsthand accounts of early on explorers, pirates, vendors, fishers, and travelers, the booklet recreates the oceans of days gone by: waters teeming with whales, sea lions, sea otters, turtles, and huge fish. The plethora of marine life explained by fifteenth century seafarers is nearly unimaginable today, but Roberts both brings it alive and artfully traces its depletion. Collapsing fisheries, he shows, are simply just the latest chapter in a long background of unfettered commercialization of the seas.
The storyplot does not end with a clear sea. Instead, Roberts explains how exactly we might bring back the splendor and success of the seas through smarter management of our resources and some simple restraint. From your coasts of Florida to New Zealand, sea reserves have fostered stunning recovery of plant life and family pets to levels not seen in a hundred years. They verify that history do not need to do it again itself: we can leave the oceans richer than we found them.
