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. In remote Echo
Bay, in the Broughton Archipelago, she found the perfect place to settle
into all she had ever dreamed of: a lifetime of observing and learning
what these big-brained mammals are saying to each other. She was lucky
enough to get there just in time to witness a place of true natural
abundance, and learned how to thrive in the wilderness as a scientist
and a single mother.
Then, in 1989, industrial aquaculture moved into the region, chasing the
whales away. Her fisherman neighbours asked her if she would write
letters on their behalf to government explaining the damage the farms
were doing to the fisheries, and one thing led to another. 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 that built around her as
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
doggedness 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.
