A Sea Full of Turtles: The Search for Optimism in an Epoch of Extinction

by Bill Streever

Overview

An inspired and impassioned story of adventure that explores the richness of marine life and charts a path of resilience and hope.

Everyone alive today is witnessing a mass extinction event caused by the more than eight billion humans who share this planet. At times, it seems there is little hope. Climate change, resource exploitation, agrochemicals, overfishing, plastics, dead zones in our oceans, drought and desertification, conversion of habitat to housing, farming, and industrial infrastructure—the list of impacts and insults goes on and on. We are, it seems, on an unalterable path that will continue to decimate biodiversity.

A feeling of hopeless, while not unwarranted, is part of the problem. Without hope, without some belief in the possibility of positive outcomes, the fight for nature is over. Why even try if the battle is already lost?

While staring the problems squarely in the face, A Sea Full of Turtles offers hope for those who care about our living world. Delivered as a travel narrative set in Mexico’s Gulf of California (Sea of Cortez), at one level the book focuses on dramatically underfunded but highly successful efforts to protect sea turtles. But the book goes beyond Mexico and beyond sea turtles to look at how some humans have changed their relationship with nature—and how that change can one day end the extinction crisis.

Enchanting, galvanizing, and brimming with joy and wonder, A Sea Full of Turtles will inspire immediate action to face the great challenges that lie ahead. Pessimism is the lazy way out. Optimism, it turns out, is both a reasonable and an essential attitude for us all as we fight for the beautiful diversity of life on our Earth.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781639366705
Publisher:	Pegasus Books
Publication date:	07/02/2024
Sold by:	SIMON & SCHUSTER
Format:	eBook
Pages:	304
File size:	44 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

Bill Streever is the bestselling and award-winning author of And Soon I Heard a Roaring Wind, Cold (a New York Times notable book), and Heat. As a biologist, he has worked on issues ranging from climate change to the restoration of Arctic tundra to underwater noise to the evolution of cave crayfish. With his wife and co-captain, he splits his time between Alaska and their cruising sailboat, currently in Central America.

Editorial Reviews

05/27/2024

In this stimulating report, nature writer Streever (In Oceans Deep) recounts traveling around Mexico’s Gulf of California to interview the fishers, nonprofit directors, scientists, and volunteers who are working to protect endangered sea turtles. Surveying the threats facing the reptiles, Streever notes that the black market for turtle meat has boomed since Mexico banned its consumption in 1990, that beachgoers sometimes unwittingly crush buried nests underfoot, and that tens of thousands of sea turtles are estimated to die each year after getting trapped in fishing nets and drowning. Among those striving to save the turtles are veterinarian Elsa Galindo, who runs a program that relocates nests away from well-trafficked beach areas, and Agnese Mancini, a scientist who evaluates the effectiveness of turtle hunting bans for a nonprofit organization. Streever sometimes drifts off topic, going on tangents about his fondness for Jainism (a religion that espouses an extreme form of “do no harm,” to the extent that some adherents refuse to step in puddles for fear of killing microbes) and whether it’s unethical for humans to continue reproducing at current rates. Still, the profiles of individuals leading conservation efforts offer reason for hope even as they make clear the direness of the sea turtle’s situation. Animal lovers will be galvanized. Agent: Jill Marr, Sandra Dijkstra Literary. (July)

Publishers Weekly

With humor, intelligence, and an infectious sense of wonder, Bill Streever's Sea Full of Turtles fosters not only appreciation for the animals in its title but a fascination with the larger topic of extinction and how it might be averted. Far from being a downer about a beleaguered species, this travel and science adventure set on the hot sandy beaches of Mexico's Gulf of California is an accessible and entertaining read that admirably avoids either excess gloom or unearned optimism. Nearly a century after John Steinbeck looked for philosophical insights in Mexican tidepools, Streever has given us a new reason to find delight and tentative hope along ever-changing shorelines.

author of Searching for Steinbeck's Sea of C Andromeda Romano-Lax

In this lovingly-crafted book, Bill Streever both builds a case for optimism for the future and takes us on a grand adventure in the boat wake of Steinbeck and Ricketts. As much about the animals as our own decisions, Sea Full of Turtles is a rare kind of honest reflection that shows us what survival can look like when we start to pay attention.

author of Spineless and Life on the Juli Berwald

If you care about the plight of sea turtles and other marine life—and we all ought to—you will be moved by this heartfelt, intimate account. With a curious eye and a gift for prose, biologist Bill Streever weaves together strands of biology, history, and anthropology in a way that only one who spends large portions of his life on and in the ocean can do.

author of What a Fish Knows and Super Fly Jonathan Balcombe

2024-04-04
An aquatic ecologist recounts his search for reasons for optimism in the face of looming extinction crises.

When Covid-19 lockdowns closed seaports, Streever, author of Cold and Heat, and his wife, a marine biologist, were at sea aboard their restored sailboat Rocinante. Cleared into a Mexican port, they spent the next several years sailing in the Gulf of California, off the Baja peninsula, where five species of sea turtles now exist. Noting that “engaging with those who make a living from the sea is a necessary part of the conservation movement,” the author interviewed the volunteer "turtlers" who find and protect turtle nests, nonprofit professionals working to promote biodiversity, a veterinarian who performed a necropsy on a dead turtle, and local fishermen. He found that the gulf area suffers from “inadequate enforcement of mostly existing regulations and a lack of opportunities for people aside from fishing.” Though the region is “one of the five most productive marine ecosystems in the world,” it has become "a badly diminished sea." Streever zeroes in on the fate of sea turtles, but his larger concern is existential. If we conceive of the history of life on Earth as a 24-hour day, he writes, humans’ attention to the conservation of our fellow species has only arisen “a mere few seconds before midnight.” Sea turtles and other "charismatic endangered species" can serve to "draw our attention, help us change our ways." Streever makes a convincing case, based on firsthand observations, that we are overdue for a major course correction. Even if humans have proven to be the species most responsible for extinction events, the author still ends on a hopeful note, and his creed of "optimistic environmentalism" becomes something other than a confounding oxymoron.

A hopeful consideration of the beauty and fate of wild sea turtles—and the natural world as a whole.

Kirkus Reviews