Not on My Watch - How a renegade whale biologist took on governments and industry to

Informationen zum Autor Alexandra Morton Klappentext NATIONAL BESTSELLER Alexandra Morton has been called "the Jane Goodall of Canada" because of her passionate thirty-year fight to save British Columbia's wild salmon. Her account of that fight is both inspiring in its own right and a roadmap of resistance. Alexandra Morton came north from California in the early 1980s, following her first love—the northern resident orca. Then, in 1989, industrial aquaculture moved into the region, chasing the whales away. Soon Alex had shifted her scientific focus to documenting the infectious diseases and parasites that pour from the ocean farm pens of Atlantic salmon into the migration routes of wild Pacific salmon, and then to proving their disastrous impact on wild salmon and the entire ecosystem of the coast.      Alex stood against the farms, first representing her community, then alone, and at last as part of an uprising in which ancient Indigenous governance resisted a province and a country that wouldn't obey their own court rulings. She has used her science, many acts of protest and the legal system in her unrelenting efforts to save wild salmon and ultimately the whales—a story that reveals her own perseverance and bravery, but also shines a bright light on the ways other humans doggedly resist the truth. Here, she brilliantly calls those humans to account for the sake of us all. Leseprobe INTRODUCTION Wonder and Resistance When I was a child I was drawn to animals, especially the wild ones, and to the ponds and forests where they lived. I was curious. I tracked them and watched them. No matter whether I was looking into the gold-flecked eye of a frog, or at the way a deer held her ears as she stepped out of the forest at sunset, animals were mysterious, beautiful and wise. When I turned eight, I knew wanted to become a scientist but I wasn’t sure how. The only picture of a woman scientist that I had seen was of Madame Curie, and I was afraid to become that person in the blurry picture wearing a white lab coat. At the same time I realized that only small children “played with animals.” A growing dread consumed me. To grow up I needed to stop spending time in the woods and marshes. I still remember the sensation of stopping myself from looking under a piece of wood where I knew a snake almost certainly lay coiled. Then just before Christmas 1965, I received an issue of National Geographic with Jane Goodall on the cover. I stared at it. The outer world paused and went silent as I sank to the dark brown carpet of my mother’s study. I pored over every picture of this beautiful woman, looking perfectly happy, who studied chimpanzees in the frightening jungle. Was she real? I felt an explosion of joy as the walls I was building around myself crumpled and the inner compass I was trying to redirect slipped free. I would follow in the footsteps of Jane Goodall. That was my promise to me. Seeing those pictures of Jane gave me my life. Thank you so much, Jane, for allowing National Geographic to expose your work and your paradise, no small sacrifice, I realized years later. Over the next decade, I read every book about scientists who, following in Goodall’s footsteps, went into the wilderness to study an animal. And I saw a pattern. While they began as people driven by curiosity and the need to understand, they inevitably became “activists,” though none of them used that term back then. The more they understood the animal they had chosen to study, the more urgently they felt the need to stand in the way of the crushing advance of human appetite for the land on which the animal relied or for the creature itself. I felt sad for these scientists. They had to abandon the dream they had worked so hard for. They had to leave the jungle, savannah or ocean to c...

Dettagli sul prodotto

• Autori: Alexandra Morton
• Editore: Random House Canada
• Lingue: Inglese
• Formato: Tascabile
• Pubblicazione: 30.08.2022
• EAN: 9780735279681
• ISBN: 978-0-7352-7968-1
• Pagine: 384
• Dimensioni: 132 mm x 203 mm x 26 mm
• Categorie: Narrativa > Romanzi > Epistole, diari; Scienze naturali, medicina, informatica, tecnica > Biologia > Ecologia