Another entertaining read from Helen Scales on life in the sea. I recently read one of her other books, so this was maybe a little too soon after the previous one. There was quite some overlap between this book and the deep sea book, and also within the book there is some repetition between chapters. But it's not a big deal to me, the author is a good writer and the ocean-related stories are amazing either way. This book focuses a lot on ocean conservation stories for different kinds of organisms. A nice read for ocean enthusiasts and scientists.

What the Wild Sea Can Be is a really delightful book to read which can be a bit surprising considering how the matter of climate change makes many of us feel (disempowered, overwhelmed, like we're facing an insurmountable obstacle). Though this book discusses the ways in which a number of species and ocean habitats have been impacted by human activity (be it the overall effects of climate change itself, overfishing, loss of sea ice), it gives us glimpses of hope not only with the ways that some species have seemed to adapt to the changes, but even moreso with the ways in which people have noticed our impacts on the planet and worked to mitigate their worst effects. These glimpses empowered me to feel as though I could be an instrument in change and that this change is both possible and has tangible impacts on the species and habitats we hope to protect. The book was filled with wonderiment about the many species in the ocean which I really enjoyed, and I learned so much about many species of which I knew very little. My biggest gripes come from two sections of the book. In one, when the author is discussing methods of coral reef restoration, she dreams up an odd scenario where tiny robots would be able to help us scale up these efforts. However, it seemed very out-of-place in a book about climate change, which in order to combat we would need to scale down production of items massively not the least of which would be technology as they require massive amounts of rare metals and minerals that harm the environment and those people who mine them. This felt especially odd considering the critiques the author has of deep sea mining, an industry which is trying to mine metals and minerals for the production of technology. The other section which I did not enjoy was when the author discussed women-owed aquaculture enterprises in Maine and utilized quotes which play into the women as Madonna trope in which women are seen as naturally more nurturing, loving, empathetic than men and as their natural "good" foil. This was wholly unnecessary for the book as there are ways to discuss the important and interesting work these women are doing without attributing it to the inherent nature of their sex instead of a conscious effort to undo harm wrought by the whole of (primarily Western) society (men and women included). I wish the author would have instead focused on how they came to this work and what inspired them instead of their sex. Nevertheless, I found this book a fun and fast read that, while giving me some climate dread, also instilled climate hope.

An educational and informative read, there was a bit of repetition of information in the chapter about deep sea mining from one of her previous books but still a great read.