United States
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The ocean covers seventy per cent of the surface of our planet, and two-thirds of this lies beyond national borders. Owned by all nations and no nation simultaneously, these waters are home to some of the richest and most biodiverse environments on the planet. But they are also home to atrocities beyond most of our imaginations.
Here, out of sight and often out of mind, industry and economic progress rule and lax enforcement and apathy are the status quo, underscored by a battle to control, profit from, protect, or obliterate the world's largest, wildest commons. Heffernan sets sail on a journey to uncover the truth behind deeply exploitative fishing practices, investigate the potentially devastating impact of deep-sea mining, and hold to task the silicone-valley interventionists whose solutions to climate change are often wildly optimistic, radically irresponsible or both.
The result is a forceful and deeply researched manifesto calling for the protection and preservation of this final frontier – the last vestiges of wilderness on Earth.
Olive Heffernan is a science journalist with over 15 years of experience as a reporter and an editor. Her writing on ocean science and climate change has been published in Nature, WIRED, National Geographic, New Scientist and BBC Wildlife, among many others. A marine biologist by training, she spent the early part of her career conserving Atlantic fish stocks before leaving academia to pursue a career in journalism. She was an editor with Nature, the founding chief editor of Nature Climate Change and chief editor of The Marine Scientist magazine. She received the Bob Barton Memorial Award for Marine Science/Technology writing, a fellowship at Scripps Institution of Oceanography and a fellowship at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. In 2019, she joined the faculty of Johns Hopkins University as an adjunct lecturer, and in 2020 received a Giles St Aubyn Award for non-fiction from the Royal Society of Literature. Heffernan has spoken at conferences and world-class research centres across Europe, the US and Asia, and continues to write and report on the high seas. She lives by the sea in Ireland with her husband and children and spends her spare time cold-water swimming, paddle-boarding, kayaking, and rock-pooling.
"This book is the essential guide to the half of our blue planet we call the high seas, written by someone who has done more than almost anyone on earth in the last few years to understand the problems we face, and the solutions that might be available."
– Will McCallum, author & director of Greenpeace UK
"A vital, fascinating, deeply researched exploration of Earth's last wilderness, owned by us all and by no one. This is powerful and urgent reportage that rips the veil of romanticism to reveal a vast world of criminal and dangerous enterprise accelerating beyond our shores, threatening us all. Shocking and starkly illuminating – a must-read."
– Gaia Vince
"With energy equal to her profound subject, Heffernan boards many ships and journeys from the Arctic to the Antarctic to bring us an illuminating portrait of a world we rarely see and barely understand – and of the hidden forces that threaten to wreck it"
– Robert Kunzig
