From the San Francisco Bay Area to the Turks and Caicos Islands to Sulawesi, Indonesia to Papua, New Guinea to French islands in the Mediterranean, Cunningham takes on a tour of the oceans, which are as stunning as they are imperiled. Along the way, we meet everyone from an Indonesian former “dynamite fisherman,” who walked
away from heftier profits
to work on saving the
ocean ecosystem his
community depends for
subsistence, to Michel
Mouisel, head of
international relations at
the French culinary school
Ferrandi-Paris, where
students learn the
techniques and practices
needed to build a
sustainable cuisine. Cunningham shows how this global network of activists is making a difference. She shows us how people throughout the world are beginning to see that we can have hope, that we must act, and—most importantly—that the two are interdependent.
OCEAN COUNTRY is an adventure story, a call to action, and a poetic meditation on the state of the seas—but most of all—it is a story of finding hope in the midst of one of the greatest crises to face humankind.
community-based programs. This amount was chosen to highlight the percentage of oxygen in each breath we take and that the fact that over one half of that oxygen comes from marine plants and algae in the ocean.
LIZ CUNNINGHAM is the author of Talking Politics: Choosing the President in the Television Age (Praeger), which features frank and probing oral- history interviews with top television journalists such as Tom Brokaw, Larry King, and Robin MacNeil. She has written for Earth Island Journal, East Bay Express, the Marin Poetry Center Anthology, The Outward Bound International Journal, Times of the Islands, and The San Francisco Chronicle. She has collaborated with institutions such as the Academy for Educational Development, the Constitutional Rights Foundation, the Tides Foundation, and the Smithsonian Institution. She also serves on the board of Outward Bound Peacebuilding and holds a B.A. in Human Ecology from College of the Atlantic in Bar Harbor, Maine. Visit her at: lizcunningham.net.
“The ocean is medicine. That’s what Liz Cunningham’s book shows us. It describes the winding, unpredictable neurological cascades that happen when we connect deeply with our waterways. We experience awe, wonder, purpose, insight, calm, excitement, solitude, romance, empathy, creativity. We become advocates, warriors, custodians, fixers, champions—we become unstoppable. In Ocean Country we meet people where they are as they heal and are reminded howmuch we all need such healing
now.”
—Wallace J. Nichols, author of Blue Mind
Twenty-one percent of royalties will be given to the New England Aquarium’s Conservation Action Fund (MCAF), which aims to protect and promote ocean biodiversity through funding of small-scale, time-sensitive,
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