The High Seas

In this “essential guide to the half of our blue planet we call the high seas” (Will McCallum, author of How to Give Up Plastic), one of the world’s leading voices on the issue tracks the race to exploit and protect our last frontier.

Two thirds of the world’s oceans lie beyond national borders. Owned by all nations and no nation simultaneously, the high seas are home to some of the richest and most biodiverse environments on the planet. But they are also home to exploitation on a scale that few of us have imagined.

Here, out of sight and out of mind, industry and economic progress rule and lax enforcement and apathy are the status quo, underscored by a battle to control, profit from, protect, or obliterate the world’s largest, wildest commons. In this book, Heffernan uncovers the truth behind deeply exploitative fishing practices, investigates the potentially devastating impact of deep-sea mining, and holds to task the Silicon Valley interventionists whose solutions to climate change are often wildly optimistic, radically irresponsible, or both. This is a powerful and deeply researched manifesto calling for the protection and preservation of this final frontier.

Olive Heffernan is a science journalist with 20 years' experience as a reporter and an editor. Her writing on ocean science and climate change has been published in Nature, WIRED, Scientific American, National Geographic, New Scientist andBBC Wildlife, among many others. A marine biologist by training, she spent the early part of her career researching Atlantic fish stocks before leaving academia to pursue a career in journalism. She was founding chief editor of Nature Climate Change and chief editor of The Marine Scientist magazine and has also been an online news and opinion editor on climate change at Nature. In 2019, she joined the faculty of Johns Hopkins University as an adjunct lecturer, and in 2020 received a Giles St Aubyn Award for non-fiction from the Royal Society of Literature. She lives by the sea in Ireland with her husband and children.