Imperiled Ocean

Human Stories from a Changing Sea

By: Laura Trethewey

Narrated by: Erica Sullivan

Length: 7 hrs and 19 mins

Publisher's summary

An exploration of the earth's last wild frontier, filled with high-stakes stories that explores a vast territory undergoing tremendous change and the people and places facing an uncertain future.

On a life raft in the Mediterranean, a teenager from Ghana wonders whether he will reach Europe alive, and if he does, whether he will be allowed to stay. In the North Atlantic, a young chef disappears from a cruise ship, leaving a mystery for his friends and family to solve. A water-squatting community battles eviction from a harbor in a Pacific Northwest town, raising the question of who owns the water.

The Imperiled Ocean by ocean journalist Laura Trethewey is a deeply reported work of narrative journalism that follows people as they head out to sea. What they discover holds inspiring and dire implications for the life of the ocean - and for all of us back on land.

As The Imperiled Ocean unfolds, battles are fought, fortunes made, lives lost, and the ocean approaches an uncertain future. Behind this human drama, the ocean is growing ever more unstable, threatening to upend life on land. As we explore with Tretheway, we meet biologist Erin Stoddard tracking sturgeon in the Pacific Northwest. Unable to stop the development and pollution destroying the fish's habitat, Stoddard races to learn about the fish before it disappears. This prehistoric fish has survived more than 300 million years on earth and could hold important truths about how humanity might make itself amenable to a changing ocean. As a fisher and scientist, Erin's ability to listen to the water becomes a parable for what faces the ocean today. By eavesdropping on an imperiled world, he shows a way we can move forward to save the oceans we all share - through listening and discovery.

©2019 Laura Trethewey (P)2019 Blackstone Publishing

Kinda dull :(

My expectations of this book were unmet. From the subtitle and the description, I thought I would experience the ways in which a warming ocean is impacting people(s). But the titular "change" was much more, hm, normal human: a couple preparing for deep sea sailing, an advocate picking up trash, a scientist seeking data.

At the end, the ocean just felt like a particular medium for humans rather than a character or force in itself. It wasn't the ocean that was changing, rather people just coping with or seeking out change in an ocean-y context. I was disappointed.

That said, it was well written and most of the stories were engaging. My favorites were the one about Hollywood visualizing the ocean, the tales of life and death sea migrations, and the death on a cruise ship. My least favorites chapters were on sturgeons (she could have made us fall in love with the creature -- instead I relearned the tedium of scientific analysis) and houseboats (just couldn't shake a feeling of annoyance, for some reason).

I sped up the reading speed more than I normally do. But hey. I finished!

Is there a money-back guarantee?

Ugh; this is the first audiobook I had to play SLOW, to combat the narrator's rapid storytelling and shrill voice. Story started-off okay but definitely didn't finish that way. Each standalone chapter is like the author's attempt to prove her 'humans have destroyed the planet' thesis, eventually devolving to be more a rambling story about the author, leaving everything up to the epilogue and listener to somehow connect the buckshot-dots. A mind-numbing chapter about sturgeon, just so the author could tell us how she got married; congrats. This one is a disappointment for me, for a genre I usually enjoy.