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Rediscovering a Lost World
by Rowan Jacobsen
In the 1990s, a marine scientist named Brian Kingzett was commissioned to survey Canada’s western coast. He saw amazing sights, from the wildest, most breathtaking coasts to the smallest of marine creatures. Along the western side of Vancouver Island, Kingzett nosed into an isolated pocket beach where he found something unusual. Amid the mussels, barnacles, and clams were round oysters—Olympias. Kingzett noted their presence and paddled on. A decade later when he met Betsy Peabody, executive director of the Puget Sound Restoration Fund (PSRF), he learned that this once ubiquitous native oyster was in steep decline, and he knew that together they would return to this remote spot.
Rowan Jacobsen, along with Kingzett, Peabody, and a small group of scientists from PSRF and the Nature Conservancy, set out last July to see if the Olys were still surviving — and if they were, what they could learn from them. The goal: to use their pristine natural beds, which have probably been around for millennia, as blueprints for the habitat restoration efforts in Puget Sound. The implications are vast. If Peabody and her team can bring good health back to Puget Sound by restoring the intertidal zones—the areas of land exposed during low tide and submerged during high tide, where oysters live—their research could serve as a model for saving the world’s oceans.
During a time when the fate of the oceans seems uncertain, Rowan Jacobsen has found hope in the form of a small shelled creature living in the lost world where all life began.
"Lovely science writing, and a smart look into where the work of ecological restoration is headed." - Kirkus Reviews
"Starred Review. Charming illustrations and a conservation resource list round out this slim and superb reminder of these simple creatures' vital importance to the grand scheme of life on land and sea." - Publishers Weekly
This information about The Living Shore was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Rowan Jacobsen is the James Beard Award– winning author of A Geography of Oysters and Fruitless Fall. Jacobsen’s writings on food, the environment, and their interconnected nature have appeared in the New York Times, Wild Earth, Harper’s, Eating Well, and Newsweek. He lives in rural Vermont with his wife and son.
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