Seasick - by Alanna Mitchell wins Grantham Prize

Awarded by the Metcalf Institute for Marine and Environmental Reporting, the prize honors outstanding coverage of the environment and recognizes reporting that has the potential to bring about constructive change. “Seasick: Ocean Change and the Extinction of Life on Earth” is first the book to be named a Grantham Prize winner. Mitchell will receive $75,000.

According to Canadian journalist Alanna Mitchell, humans are biologically occupying this planet on sufferance, at the grace of the ocean. The seas both gives us life and keep us alive, she persuasively argues in Seasick, her impassioned environmental exposition.

If all life on land became extinct, she explains, creatures in the ocean would flourish. But if the opposite occurred and the oceanic system died, then the land-dwelling creatures would also die. Life would have to start afresh. So why are humans destroying our only hope for survival? Is it because we reason that there are plenty more fish in sea? Mitchell intelligently pulls together the strands of current scientific knowledge and claims that the ocean is sick and the malady is a weightier and a more crucial predicament than atmospheric change.

Many scientists agree with Mitchell’s theory of mass degeneration beneath the waves and its consequences to life on this planet. Seasick reveals the global ocean’s vital signs are fading and that “the cold Southern ocean is becoming saturated with carbon dioxide, meaning it won’t be able to absorb much more.” What is the final result of this change? When will it occur? And how will homo sapiens fare? These are a few of the questions asked in this extraordinarily thorough book. If the oceans die, so does all life on land. Is that worth reading about? If you think so, Seasick: The hidden ecological crisis of the global ocean is a timely wake-up call to us all.

Alanna Mitchell spent fourteen years as a writer covering science and the environment at the Globe and Mail. She is also the author of “Dancing at the Dead Sea: Tracking the World’s Environmental Hotspots,” published by the University of Chicago Press.