The Last Great Sea: A Voyage Through the Human and Natural History of the North Pacific Ocean

Sockeye are disappearing, mackerel snap at hooks set for chinook, gray whales shun the coasts, common murres are quitting their colonies: the ecology of the North Pacific, writes Terry Glavin in The Last Great Sea, is being remade before our eyes. Just why North Pacific marine and coastal environments are so rapidly dying is a matter of much debate. For some fishing communities, Glavin writes, “it was the seals, it was urban development, it was logging, or the pollution of rivers, and always, it was the politicians and the bureaucrats and the Indians.”

For Americans it was the Canadians, the Japanese, the Russians–the round-robin list of blame goes on. Glavin is less concerned with finding guilty parties than assuring us that these losses are very real. Among other things, he reports a study by University of Victoria biologist Tom Reimchen that documents the importance of nitrogen yielded by salmon carcasses in nourishing the great forests. As these chains are broken, ancient ways of life disappear, too; in one of the book?s many highlights, Glavin convincingly argues that North America was peopled not by hunters crossing the Bering Sea by way of a land bridge, but by fishers plying the seas from North Asia. From Amazon.ca