For nearly fifty years, people all over the world have celebrated Earth Day each April 22, coming together in support of environmental protection. It’s an opportunity to reflect on how we’re doing as stewards of this planet, to educate ourselves about the value of sound environmental policies, and to appreciate the beauties of nature. Here’s a starter list of […]
![World Without Fish](http://img.images-bn.com/static/redesign/srcs/images/grey-box.png?v11.9.4)
![World Without Fish](http://img.images-bn.com/static/redesign/srcs/images/grey-box.png?v11.9.4)
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Overview
"Can you imagine a world without fish? It's not as crazy as it sounds. But if we keep doing things the way we've been doing things, fish could become extinct within fifty years. So let's change the way we do things!"
World Without Fish is the uniquely illustrated narrative nonfiction account—for kids—of what is happening to the world’s oceans and what they can do about it. Written by Mark Kurlansky, author of Cod, Salt, The Big Oyster, and many other books, World Without Fish has been praised as “urgent” (Publishers Weekly) and “a wonderfully fast-paced and engaging primer on the key questions surrounding fish and the sea” (Paul Greenberg, author of Four Fish). It has also been included in the New York State Expeditionary Learning English Language Arts Curriculum.
Written by a master storyteller, World Without Fish connects all the dots—biology, economics, evolution, politics, climate, history, culture, food, and nutrition—in a way that kids can really understand. It describes how the fish we most commonly eat, including tuna, salmon, cod, swordfish—even anchovies— could disappear within fifty years, and the domino effect it would have: the oceans teeming with jellyfish and turning pinkish orange from algal blooms, the seabirds disappearing, then reptiles, then mammals. It describes the back-and-forth dynamic of fishermen, who are the original environmentalists, and scientists, who not that long ago considered fish an endless resource. It explains why fish farming is not the answer—and why sustainable fishing is, and how to help return the oceans to their natural ecological balance.
Interwoven with the book is a twelve-page graphic novel. Each beautifully illustrated chapter opener links to the next to form a larger fictional story that perfectly complements the text.
Product Details
ISBN-13: | 9781523507092 |
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Publisher: | Workman Publishing Company |
Publication date: | 06/15/2018 |
Sold by: | Hachette Digital, Inc. |
Format: | eBook |
Pages: | 208 |
Sales rank: | 461,951 |
Lexile: | 1160L (what's this?) |
File size: | 17 MB |
Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
Age Range: | 8 - 12 Years |
About the Author
![About The Author](http://img.images-bn.com/static/redesign/srcs/images/grey-box.png?v11.9.4)
Frank Stockton is an artist and illustrator whose work has appeared in Esquire, The New Yorker, The New York Times, and Rolling Stone. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.
Hometown:
New York, NYDate of Birth:
December 7, 1948Place of Birth:
Hartford, CTEducation:
Butler University, B.A. in Theater, 1970Read an Excerpt
Introduction Being A Brief Outline Of The Problem A large stock of individuals of the same species, relative to the number of its enemies, is absolutely necessary for its preservation. —Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species Most stories about the destruction of the planet involve a villain with an evil plot. But this is the story of how the earth could be destroyed by well-meaning people who fail to solve a problem simply because their calculations are wrong. Most of the fish we commonly eat, most of the fish we know, could be gone in the next fifty years. This includes salmon, tuna, cod, swordfish, and anchovies. If this happens, many other fish that depend on these fish will also be in trouble. So will seabirds that eat fish, such as seagulls and cormorants. So will mammals that eat fish, such as whales, porpoises, and seals. And insects that depend on seabirds, such as beetles and lizards. And mammals that depend on beetles and lizards. Slowly—or maybe not so slowly—in less time than the several billion years it took to create it—life on planet Earth could completely unravel. People who are in school today are lucky to have been born at a special moment in history. The Industrial Revolution, beginning in the mid-eighteenth century and continuing for the next 120 years shifted production from handcrafts to machine-made factory goods and in so doing completely changed the relationship of people to nature, the relationship of people to each other, politics, art, and architecture—the look and thought of the world. In the next fifty years, much of your working life, there will be as much change in less than half the time. The future of the world, perhaps even the survival of the planet, will depend on how well these changes are handled. And so you have more opportunities and more responsibilities than any other generation in history. One of the great thinkers of the Industrial Revolution was an Englishman named Charles Darwin. In 1859, he had published one of the most important books ever written: On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life, more commonly known by its shortened title: On the Origin of Species. In his book, Darwin explained the order of nature as a system in which all the many various plant and animal species struggle for survival. He did not see nature as particularly nice or kind, but as a cruel system in which species attempted to kill and dominate other species in order to secure the survival of their own kind. He wrote, “We do not see, or we forget, that the birds which are idly singing round us, mostly live on insects or seeds, and are thus constantly destroying life.” Plants and animals are organized into groups with seven major levels or categories: kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus (plural: genera), species. A codfish and a human belong to the same kingdom, which is animals. They also belong to the same phylum, which is vertebrates (animals with spines). But after that, they break off into completely different classes— cod are fish and humans are mammals. More specifically, humans are vertebrates of the class known as mammals in the order known as primates, which we share with monkeys and lemurs. We belong to the family Hominidae, which we share with apes and chimpanzees. Within that family, we are of the genus Homo, which are Hominidae that walk standing up on two feet. (Several other Homo genera have all died off and we are the only surviving species of this family: Homo sapiens.) Cod, on the other hand, are fish—specifically fish with jaws—that belong to a family called Gadidae. This fish family is fairly evolved, has elaborate fins, and lives in the bottom part of the ocean. They hunt voraciously the species living directly over and beneath them, and have white flesh greatly favored by Homo sapiens. Darwin wrote of how all species struggle for the survival of their own group. So it is not surprising that we humans have the greatest affection for organisms that are biologically close to us. Killing our own species is the worst thing we can do. Killing close relatives to our species, like monkeys, though it occurs, is revolting to most of us. We tend to care more about our own class—mammals, such as whales and seals and polar bears—than we do about fish. Is that because they are in a different class? Is that why people tend to have less sympathy for animals that are not in our phylum, like insects? Ultimately, a vegetarian is a human who rejects killing living things from his own kingdom—animals—but accepts killing from the other kingdom—plants.
Table of Contents
Introduction Being A Brief Outline Of The Problem....Ix Chapter One Being A Short Exposition About What Could Happen And How It Would Happen....1 Chapter Two Being The True Story Of How Humans First Began To Fish And How Fishing Became An Industry....21 Chapter Three Being The Sad, Cautionary Tale Of The Orange Roughy....39 Chapter Four Being The Myth Of Nature’s Bounty And How Scientists Got It Wrong For Many Years....51 Chapter Five Being A Concise History Of The Politics Of Fish....63 Chapter Six Being An Examination Of Why We Can’t Simply Stop Fishing....77 Chapter Seven Being A Detailed Look At Four Possible Solutions and Why They Alone Won’t Work....87 Chapter Eight The Best Solution To Overfishing: Sustainable Fishing....107 Chapter Nine How Pollution is Killing Fish, Too....117 Chapter Ten How Global Warming is Also Killing Fish....135 Chapter Eleven Time To Wake Up And Smell The Fish....143 Resources....173 Index....182 Acknowledgments....184