What the Wild Sea Can Be

Helen Scales

Grove Press

£18.99

Helen Scales’s most recent book on the future of the world’s oceans opens with her delight at the raucous, vigorous gannet colony at Hermaness, Unst. Yet this is July 18, 2022, when the UK was issued with its first ‘red’ extreme heat warning. At the bottom of the cliffs, lie hundreds of bird corpses, dead from Avian flu. It’s emotive and disturbing, appropriate for her complex subject matter. Many statistics are shocking: of every 100 white-tipped sharks in the 1980s Pacific, there are only 5 today. Bluewater yachtsmen know that, they report the emptier ocean.

Her analysis is expert, stimulating and not entirely without hope, if we all take a share in the solution.