A Year with the Seals

For readers Jennifer Ackerman and Ed Yong, environmental journalist Alix Morris’s recounts the year she spent following seals, revealing their daily lives and fascinating habits, as well as the effects of their unprecedented return from the brink of extinction on many human communities, ultimately exploring how we can try to bring nature back into balance.

It might be their large, strangely human eyes or their dog-like playfulness, but seals have long captured people's interest and affection, making them the perfect candidate for an environmental cause, as well as the subject of decades of study. Alix Morris spends a year with these magnetic creatures and brings them to life on the page, season by season, as she learns about their complex relationships with each other, their ecosystems, the changing climate, and the humans who hunt and rescue them, regulate their protections and compete with them for food sources, and sometimes adopt them as pets, or even friends.
 
Along with the enigmatic seals themselves, Morris gets to know all of the competing interests in the intense debate about the newly recovered seal population in our coastal waters, from local fisherman whose catch is often diminished by savvy seals, to tribes who once relied seal-hunting for food, clothing, and medicine, to the seal rescue workers and biologists, to surfers now encountering seal-hunting sharks.

In a world where wildlife populations are disappearing at an alarming rate, A Year with the Seals is a rare look at what happens when conservation efforts actually work, and how human tampering with ecosystems continues to have unexpected consequences for a wide variety of species, humans included.