What the Wild Sea Can Be

June 2025
Overall Verdict: ★ ★ ★ ★ 
To buy this book, click here.

Why this book?
Having spotted the intriguing title and beautiful cover of this book, I’m very grateful to Atlantic Books London for sending me a copy of this book to improve my subject knowledge and think about how this book might be useful for fellow geography teachers.

The book begins with a prelude that sets the scene for the book and reminds us that:
‘the future of the ocean matters to everyone. No matter where you live and what you do, even if you have never seen the sea in real life, you would not exist- none of us would- without the ocean’ (p.xvii). For many of us, the oceans and marine ecosystems remain an element of our planet that is neglected in our geography curriculums- something I’m hopeful might change in the near future with curriculum reform. We could of course increase our teaching of the oceans and marine environments at Key Stage 3 where there is more space- as many are doing. From what I’ve seen, the mastery curriculum of Ark is perhaps the leader in this. Regardless of how prominent the oceans are in your curriculum currently however; this book is an excellent read that greatly refreshed my subject knowledge.

For teachers:
Throughout the book, the ocean’s past is linked to its present. What threats did the ocean face in the past and how did it respond? What can we learn from the past that might inform us of future changes? What are the positive and negative impacts of what we’re currently doing in a quest to better protect these environments? Importantly, a key theme of the book is the potential of the oceans to recover if we let them. The author is keen for the reader to appreciate how quickly the health of our oceans could improve if we can control the exploitation, destruction, and pollution that we currently subject them to. 

Whilst discussing the past and present context of the world’s ocean, as the sub-title of the book suggests, it largely centres on the future of the world’s oceans. It is this discussion in particular that is so useful to our subject knowledge as geography teachers and the reason why, in this review, I’ve taken a different approach to sharing my key take-aways. Rather than sharing and reflecting on specific sections that are useful to geography teachers, I’ve listed what I learnt from the book to (hopefully) share an insight into this engaging, informative, and inspiring read.

The following facts and quotes were of course part of a much broader discussion and so I’ve presented them in a very reductionist way here but hopefully one that will give you an insight into the breadth of content covered in this book.

On climate change and the oceans
‘While contemplating the future of the ocean, it’s worth pausing to think about the past. But, to think about the past (of oceans) requires an obvious and dizzying shift in perspective, because ocean life stretches behind us for more time than our human brains can instinctively grasp.’ (p.5)

‘Past changes have had multiple, often unidentifiable triggers. This time a single species is to blame, one that’s aware, at least to some extent, of the trouble being caused. Humans are in the unique position of having a chance to make a conscious decision about the future of the earth’s biodiversity and with it our own future.’ (p.29)

‘The order of the ocean’s fauna and flora used to be shaped just by climate, ecology, and geography. Now it’s being directly shaped by people too. Not so long ago, there were places that were home to only certain combinations of species, with well-traversed routes and highways where they roamed. Now, a turbulent remixing is underway, making it a daunting prospect to work out what the future ocean will look like’ (p.31)

‘On land, the pace of climate migration is an order of magnitude slower than in the sea. The ocean offers far fewer obvious boundaries and obstacles for migrating species to overcome’ (p.36)

‘In the sea, it’s common for species to end up living a long way from where they were born, giving them an inbuilt capacity for shifting to cooler climes as the ocean around them heats. Ocean dwellers in a warming world also need to move more urgently than land dwellers because they tend to live within narrow thermal safety margins. They’re not used to getting much hotter or colder, as they evolved to live at temperatures that fluctuate very little on a daily or seasonal basis. So, ocean species are highly sensitive to warming’ (p.36)

‘To make matters worse, there’s nowhere easy to hide from heat in the ocean. The only real option is to move somewhere cooler, by either travelling towards the poles, tracking cold currents or retreating to greater depths’ (p.37)

On exploitation of the oceans
‘It can take less than a generation for fishing communities to become accustomed to new assemblies of species, welcoming in those that are profitable, shunning those that are tasteless, toxic or otherwise disagreeable. Ideas of what belongs where in the ocean will continue to be shaped by human wants and needs’ (p.46)

‘The changing availability of seafood in the warming ocean will add to growing global inequalities and widen the gap in income and food security between rich and poor’ (p.47)

On ocean ecosystems
‘Krill in Antarctica: no other ecosystem on earth relies so much on a single species. Even apex predators, such as orcas and leopard seals, are no more than one step away from krill.’ (p.72)

‘For now, it’s difficult to disentangle the combined impacts of climate change and krill fishing because they’re happening in the same time and space. Indeed, as the ice is retreating south, the factory ships are also motoring further south to access newly exposed regions of previously untouched sea’ (p.75)

On protecting the oceans
‘Making certain parts of the ocean off-limits to exploitation comes with other potential drawbacks and can lead to a false sense of security and risky decisions about how the rest of the ocean is used.’(p.162)

‘Second only to the US, France has a vast oceanic territory covering almost 4 million square miles. Most of it is made up of overseas territories, holdovers from the colonial era’ (p.166)

‘In the waters of the EU, more than half of all so-called protected areas are commercially trawled’ (p.166)

‘In the scramble to meet international targets, political expediency is taking precedence over the real needs of the environment. Quantity is coming before quality. The more of the ocean that is declared protected and then is left unguarded or is assigned regulations that are so weak as to be meaningless, the greater the risk that global leaders will lose sight of what actually maters in the ocean’ (p.167)

‘For decades, rewilding has also been happening in the ocean, although it has rarely been called that’ (p.174)

‘Up until now, the standard strategy has been to build higher and stronger walls between people and the ocean. Seawalls, surge barriers, levees and other engineered installations can work predictably and very well, right up until the moment when they don’t anymore. (p.238)

To buy this book, click here.