We started Hakai Magazine over 10 years ago because the ocean and its coastlines needed a voice. No other outlet was exclusively covering issues at the interface of sea and land—or of the marine world in general.

After all these years, most stories in the marine beat are as familiar to me as the liturgy I grew up reciting (and, like all lapsed Catholics, will never forget). Our reporting on climate change, fisheries, human-wildlife interactions, and deep-sea mining—and anything and everything about whales—borders on the ritualistic. But while liturgy rarely changes, science does, and so does our understanding of these issues. At Hakai, we’ve done our best to adapt—to share what’s new, what’s urgent, and what’s inspiring in ways that keep you, our readers, informed, engaged, and entertained.

Unlike those age-old religious texts, science is never set in stone; it’s a dynamic conversation. As environmental journalists, we play a role in that conversation, reflecting not just the facts but the humanity within them. When someone asked me what my overall takeaway is after a decade of editing a science magazine focused on oceans and coastlines, I thought first about our humanity, not our beat. One of the deeper meanings of humanity is recognizing our shared responsibility to each other and to nature itself. It’s this compassion—this humaneness—that the Hakai team has carried into our stories. We’ve contemplated how whales and humans talk, the beauty of an island too inhospitable for people, and seabirds’ relationship with fish, for example, to illustrate that we are all part of this fragile, interconnected planet.

We are a team of people—flawed and forgetful, but also hopeful and cheerful—with big hearts, motivated by the belief that, through journalism, we can make the world a little bit better. With every story we have produced, we’ve kept in mind the global conversation about various issues and have made an effort to write with enough depth and thoughtfulness to offer our readers moments of self-reflection, compassion, and connection. As critics rightfully point out, digital media and communication are nothing like face-to-face conversation. In the absence of human connection, our ability to experience those moments atrophies. Yet, despite all its downsides, digital media is how most of us share ideas, make sense of our lives, and attempt to make meaningful attachments.

At Hakai, we’ve done our best to ensure that what we have offered you through this digital space—our stories, our words, our images—carried the power to spark reflection, compassion, and connection. Over the past 10 years, I believe this team of imperfect people with big hearts has honored you, our audience, and the world we all love. And we’ll keep doing that in 2025 and beyond at biographic.com.

When a ship wrecks on an unfamiliar coastline, an already desperate situation is all the more dire. Blinded by the night, and lost, the captain and crew of the Puritan, a four-masted lumber schooner en route from San Francisco, California, to Port Gamble, Washington, in 1896, faced two agonizing options: abandon ship into the roiling sea and head toward shore through a rock-riddled shoal or stay aboard and hope the hull would hold.

Captain Atwood chose the latter and ordered his nine crewmen to lash themselves to the rigging to avoid slipping off the tilting deck and into the ocean’s frothing gullet. So bound, they waited until darkness slid into light. As the shoreline morphed into view on that November morning, the men got a sense of their position. The ship was pinioned to a reef, being rocked and hammered by the Pacific. The shore was tormentingly close, just 400 meters or so away, but the span too perilous to cross.

The Puritan had run aground on the west coast of Vancouver Island, British Columbia, near Bonilla Point, about 110 kilometers west of Victoria. Today, the sobriquet “Graveyard of the Pacific” is hackneyed, but in the late 1800s, when colonial expansion was well underway in western North America, the graveyard—a stretch of coastline roughly from the Columbia River in the United States to northern Vancouver Island—acquired ships on the regular. In what probably seemed like an uninhabited middle of nowhere, Atwood and his men waited for a miracle. Luckily, they were actually in the inhabited middle of somewhere—a coastline that for millennia had been home to Indigenous peoples. Did the mariners think they were delirious when shadowy apparitions at the forest’s edge resolved into flesh-and-blood men and started wading toward the schooner?

Waist deep in the churning sea, the men tied a stone to the end of a fishing line and tossed it toward the crew. Toss, haul in. Toss, haul in. Toss, haul in. For almost eight hours, a newspaper later reported, they threw the line and the Puritan crew tried to catch it.

Finally, a crewman hooked the line and attached a heavier line to the smaller one. The rescuers then dragged the line to shore and secured it, allowing the crew to sling themselves to safety as if on a zipline. From there, the Indigenous men escorted the Puritan’s crew to a nearby shelter where they provided food and stayed with the men until help arrived.

Sixty kilometers up the coast and 128 years later, another rescue is underway. On a drippy, monochrome February afternoon, nine men on three boats scan the rocky shore of Trevor Channel near the small village of Bamfield. They’ve been alerted by a “pan-pan, pan-pan, pan-pan” call—marine radio lingo for an urgent but not life-threatening situation: “At one-six-zero-zero Pacific Standard Time, this station received a report of overdue kayakers in the vicinity of Trevor Channel, Robbers Pass,” coast guard radio reported. Three kayakers missed their scheduled check-in call and are considered overdue.

From a boat nearby, Thomas Kerr, senior search and rescue program officer with the Canadian Coast Guard, watches the boats watching the shore. He’s the one who instigated this search an hour earlier, when he tossed three bald, floppy, PFD-wearing manikins into the water, securing them in place with small anchors. “Don’t be a dummy and lose the dummy,” he quipped as he tethered one with the name tag Julio to a buoy near Robbers Passage.

The nine men searching for Julio, and his friends Amy and Carl, are in Bamfield for immersive training in marine search and rescue. They come from four First Nations along the BC coast, the farthest from the Nisga’a First Nation village of Gingolx where the Nass River empties into the Pacific, north of Prince Rupert. Most have taken a few days just to get here, tasked by their communities to take part.

The intensive course is part of the Canadian Coast Guard’s Coastal Nations Search and Rescue (CNSAR) program, which provides support and training, as well as equipment and infrastructure, to coastal First Nations. The program has been evolving since its inception in 2015, and today, about 27 participants a year take the training in Bamfield, just one of a suite of programs under the coast guard’s Indigenous Community Response Training umbrella. The instruction and formal support are recognition that, like the men who rescued the crew of the Puritan, some of the coast’s most capable search and rescue specialists have been quietly at work since 1854 and no doubt long before. On New Year’s Day of that year, British Columbia’s first recorded shipwreck happened on the west coast. The 14 surviving crewmen of the British brig William were taken ashore and sheltered and fed by Indigenous people living near Pachena Point, just up the coast from where the Puritan wrecked nearly 43 years later.

Getting to this point—where some coastal nations are more formally integrated into search and rescues and receive world-class support and training—required foresight by coast guard brass and a great deal of trust by First Nations. Recognition of their on-the-ground expertise within their territories and acknowledgment of their historical participation in rescues—saving survivors, recovering and sometimes burying bodies, getting word of the wreck to lighthouses or nearby settlements—has been long in coming. At best, rescuers in the past were acknowledged with a passing mention in the newspaper, or perhaps a medal or the award of cash. At worst, they were hanged.

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A few days before the mock search for Julio and his friends, the first 2024 cohort of CNSAR participants gathers at McKay Bay Lodge in Bamfield. They’ve settled into their rooms and are gathered in the main lodge for orientation. Over dinner, they dispatch stunning mounds of spaghetti and talk quietly among themselves. Every once in a while, murmurs crescendo into cheers—several are streaming the annual All Native Basketball Tournament on their phones and they all have community teams in the competition. The tourney is in its 64th year, and it’s a big deal for the nations who travel to Prince Rupert for the friendly, but also fiercely competitive, week-long event. The shared experience and good-natured goading provides a bit of levity.

Dinner is also punctuated a few times by Scooby-Doo’s ruh-roh. It’s participant Tim Davidson’s text alert from his wife back on Haida Gwaii who’s eight-weeks pregnant and checking in regularly. Within a few minutes of meeting Davidson on the dock earlier that day, he’d shared that it’s the first time he’s been away from his young son. He gripped the front of his PFD, revealing a tattoo of a small hand—the size of his boy’s at three weeks—on the back of his.

After dinner, the group crowds onto the couch and armchairs in the lodge’s small living room, the fire in the woodstove snaps, and the large picture window clouds with moisture. This cohort just happens to be all men—women also take part—and ranges in age from 24 to 58. As they pass around a hefty coil of cedar-bark rope, a gift from a past participant that is used as a talking stick of sorts, the men share where they’re from and why they’ve come. Almost all mention their families, either their immediate relations or the larger extended family—aunties, cousins, grandparents, and other elders—of their coastal homes. They’re excited to be here, perhaps nervous and unsure of what to expect, but ultimately they’re eager to gain skills that will serve their communities. They’re all watermen, have spent their lives on boats, and are often tasked with searches since there’s no one else to call—the coast guard can be several hours away. Often, that means searching for a friend or relative. “Picture a 16-year-old kid riding up the river in the dark going to look for your cousin,” says William Smythe of Gingolx, his voice hesitant. “That’s how it started [for me].”

Most have been tasked to come by their communities because they’re already serving in emergency capacities. Warren Aster, from the Gitxaała Nation on British Columbia’s central coast, is emblematic of this. He does community policing for his nation, serves in the fire department and as a first responder, and does environmental monitoring such as water quality testing and abalone surveys. Similarly, Fabian Stewart, from Gingolx, is fire chief and bylaw officer and is always called upon for rescues, whether they be on land or water. “If [there’s an emergency] and you have a running boat, you’d better go out and look,” echoes Smythe, Stewart’s lifelong friend.

In mariners’ parlance, these boats are “vessels of opportunity”—vessels in the vicinity of an incident that can respond. Because in British Columbia there are dozens of coastal First Nations communities—many of which are boat- or floatplane-access-only and where many residents will learn to drive a boat long before they can drive a car—it stands to reason that many of the first first responders on scene will be people from these communities. Such was the case on October 25, 2015, when two fishermen from Ahousaht, a First Nation village of about 1,100 people just up the coast from Tofino, a popular resort destination on Vancouver Island’s west coast, spotted a distress flare. It had been sent from the Leviathan II, a Tofino-based whale watching boat that had capsized. The fishermen tried to get through to the coast guard on channel 16, the emergency channel, but the reception was poor. They also roused their community of Ahousaht on marine VHF channel 68, the radio frequency used for everyday communication within the village. Within minutes, community members mobilized in their own boats. In the end, the Ahousahts helped rescue 21 people and retrieved the bodies of five. The coast guard also responded, as did other boats in the area, but the event brought into sharp relief the fact that First Nations people are often first on scene in marine emergencies and that the coordination of rescue efforts between First Nations and federal authorities was “lacking,” as Roger Girouard, then assistant commissioner for the Canadian Coast Guard said in the accident’s aftermath.

The Leviathan II, as well as the sinking of the BC ferry Queen of the North in 2006—in which the people from Hartley Bay, within Gitga’at First Nation territory, helped get 99 passengers and crew safely to shore—were two dramatic and catastrophic events that demonstrated First Nations people were the “absolute best asset in terms of a first-on-scene resource for marine search and rescue,” says Geoff Carrow, deputy superintendent of search and rescue programs at the Canadian Coast Guard.

When the Leviathan II sank in 2015, the coast guard was taking its first tentative steps to more formally work with First Nations and had started to reach out to communities, but the accident spurred the effort and the 2017 Oceans Protection Plan provided seed funding. The CAN $1.5-billion federal initiative to improve marine safety and protect and restore marine ecosystems included significant investment for coastal First Nations to provide training, equipment, and coordinated planning for integration of local teams into search and rescue operations. Carrow and two other staff were dedicated full-time to crafting the Indigenous Community Response Training program in British Columbia. From the beginning, Carrow knew that for the relationship to work, it had to be led by the communities and it had to be built on trust. First question: Were the communities interested in a more formalized relationship? If so, what did they need? The coast guard’s efforts needed to be tangible and dependable. First Nations were all too accustomed to people arriving on their shores unannounced or with grand pronouncements or ideas to impose.

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Since the first recorded contact was made on the BC coast in 1774, when Spanish explorer Juan Pérez on the ship Santiago traded briefly with Haida and Nuu-chah-nulth people, unknown ships have often proved problematic to Indigenous peoples. Explorers, traders, sealers, churches, Indian agents and other representatives of governments took many things: resources, cultural artifacts, fishing gear, children. They left other things behind: diseases, missionaries, burned villages, destroyed canoes, confusion, mistrust.

Worldviews and ideologies collided in February 1869 when the bark John Bright was wrecked on a boulder-studded stretch of shore near Estevan Point, Vancouver Island, losing all 22 on board, including the captain’s wife and children and their nanny. It’s unclear whether the disaster was witnessed by Hesquiaht people of the area, but sometime after it happened, a group came upon the wreck and the beach strewn with bodies, some without clothes, arms, heads. They carried the remains above the high-tide line; some they buried.

Weeks later, a passing trader, known for his less-than-scrupulous behavior, brought news of the wreck to Victoria, where the tragedy was twisted and sensationalized in the British Colonist, the newspaper of the day, fomenting outrage in the capital’s citizenry. The victims had been alive when they got to shore, the self-proclaimed witness insisted, only to be murdered, raped, and defiled on shore—heads cut off “to preclude the possibility of identification,” and the “bodies stripped of all clothing.”

When a body is tossed from a ship and onto a shoreline of boulders and reefs, it churns like a rag doll in a rock tumbler. The head, heavy as a bowling ball, is often the first to disarticulate. Feet also detach, and limbs; the clothing is peeled off by abrasion and the sea’s icy fingers. Coroners know this, and it’s likely that people living on the coast have long known this, too.

The surgeon aboard the gunboat HMS Sparrowhawk, the ship used by the colonial government to dispense law and order along the coast, said as much when he assumed the role of coroner and inspected exhumed bodies, noting that he could find no medical evidence to indicate that the bodies had been decapitated by human hands. He wrote in his notes that wild animals and pounding surf likely accounted for the injuries.

When the Sparrowhawk arrived on their shore, the Hesquiahts seemed unconcerned and willingly cooperated, including showing the items they’d salvaged from the wreck. Still, despite the coroner’s testimony, officials aboard the Sparrowhawk determined foul play and demanded the villagers turn over the perpetrators. When none were forthcoming, Royal Marines came ashore and burned houses and destroyed canoes. Finally, seven men—five witnesses and two accused—were seized and taken to Victoria for trial.

Against an all-male, all-white jury and unrelenting newspaper coverage, two Hesquiaht men—John Anayitzachist and Katkinna—were accused of murder and sentenced to be hanged. With the men in irons, the Sparrowhawk took them home to their village where they were executed on the beach in front of their community. David Higgins, publisher of the British Colonist, couldn’t resist a final smug volley when he reported that the gallows was left in place as a “lesson” to other “evil-disposed Indians.”

It’s no wonder that it can take time for coastal nations to trust the government when it comes calling, even a century and a half later.

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The best advice Carrow received when he first started with the Indigenous Community Response Training was from a supervisor who told him to visit coastal First Nations communities, spend time on the docks, and ask, “How can I help?”

“We didn’t show up with a plan,” Carrow says. “We didn’t show up saying, ‘This is how we’re going to do things.’” Instead, he introduced himself to locals and learned who was often called on for searches or to help tow boats or otherwise offer marine assistance. He found those people whose doors others banged on at 2:00 a.m. when there was an emergency. Then, he explains, he chatted with them about their search and rescue experience, toured their boats, and asked what equipment they might need, such as flares, PFDs, first aid kits, or radios. If they’re going out in their personal boats to help people, “we need to get them the equipment they need so that they’re safe on the water and that they can communicate with us,” says Carrow.

Over eight years, he’s been a consistent face of the program, with strong relationships in First Nations communities. Government officials are too often thought of as driftwood, he says; “We come and go with the tide.”

Today, the program is multifaceted. Carrow, Kerr, and their colleagues regularly visit about 20 coastal communities a year to deliver equipment and get updates on training needs, and they offer different options for skills training, from the thrice-yearly Bamfield intensive to a recently developed “soft landing” program that brings participants to Victoria to tour the coast guard station there, meet staff, and see how they, and their community, can fit within the program.

Carrow’s team supports a broad range of people to build the search and rescue capacity along the coast. Most comprehensive are the self-run and community-led Coastal Nations Coast Guard Auxiliary stations. Eight are currently operational, with two more in the works. They’re in places that have a demonstrated search and rescue need—where communities already do a significant number of searches, and which aren’t easily served by regular coast guard stations. These units have purpose-built rescue vessels with appropriate equipment, and they get the most intensive training. Carrow and his colleagues also support community members who are on the water for work, for instance: coastal guardians, teams trained to respond to environmental emergencies, and even water taxi drivers and fishermen. When Carrow does his introduction at the Bamfield CNSAR course, he sums up the program’s philosophy: “We’re trying to figure out how to best support you so you can continue doing what you’re doing out there, which is rocking it,” he says. “But we want you to come home safe.”

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Safety on the water includes excellent communication, and that’s a constant theme during the week at Bamfield. As the participants go through the mock rescue of the missing kayakers, Kerr constantly stresses clear communication, both on the boats and over the radio. “[We want to] get them in the habit of communicating with us,” says Kerr. “Us” means the coast guard and the Joint Rescue Coordination Centre in Victoria. For teams used to getting the job done on their own, linking into the greater coast guard’s more rigid set of protocols can take some getting used to.

One of the boats calls in to Kerr, who is rescue lead: “Exercise radio, exercise radio. This is RHIOT 2. We have a possible person in the water at four eight, five three, decimal, zero five north; one two five, zero seven, decimal, five three west.”

Kerr asks their intentions—they’ll investigate, come alongside, and pull the person out of the water—and confirms he’ll pass on the details to the rescue coordination center.

About four minutes later, RHIOT 2 reports back that they’ve recovered Amy, that she is “cold but otherwise fine,” and that they are keeping her warm and will transport her to Bamfield for further care.

Faux kayakers safe and accounted for, the participants return to Bamfield at dusk. But the day’s exercises aren’t over yet. They have unceremoniously hauled the rescue manikins aboard during the scenario, and now it’s time to learn proper techniques. Illuminated by the spotlights on the Bamfield coast guard station dock, the men jump into the frigid Pacific and spend the next hour learning PIW—person in water—recovery techniques, taking turns being victim and rescuer.

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Alec Dick, from Ahousaht, was one of the first to take the plunge with the CNSAR program back in 2016. Dick carried out emergency services for his community, so when the Leviathan II sank in 2015, his house became a command center of sorts. His living room window looked out toward the scene of the disaster, and he monitored the community boats heading out to respond. “The coast guard wasn’t on site yet,” he explains. “I was telling these guys that if you have people on board, get going to Tofino.” After the initial disaster, the community continued to help in the search for one missing person. “We did locate [him] a few days later,” he says.

Dick motions to another location visible from the beach where a float plane with three Ahousaht people on board crashed in 2010, another accident that initiated a full-on community response. A water taxi driver from the village was first on site, and his ability to pinpoint the location where the plane sank was invaluable to coast guard divers when they arrived. On the off chance someone had made it out of the plane, community members walked and boated the beaches and rocky shorelines for days after. There were no survivors, and the incident was a sobering reminder that search and rescue response in these small communities often means looking for a loved one.

Dick’s years of emergency response experience made him an ideal contact when the coast guard was looking to have a more formal relationship with coastal nations. “After the [Leviathan II] happened, we had a big meeting with the Canadian Coast Guard and other government people, and I was asked if I was willing to become part of the auxiliary coast guard,” he says. It was a welcome change in attitude. “I think they finally realized they need to be working with First Nations. We knew it a long time ago, that we needed to be interconnected in some way to work together.”

Ahousaht’s chief and council agreed to the coast guard’s offer to craft a program together, and Dick became one of the first to go through the Bamfield course. He’s a leader in the CNSAR program, and his instrumental role in helping to develop the program earned him a BC lieutenant governor’s award for maritime achievement. Although he leaves a lot of the responses to younger members now, he’s still fully involved in the CNSAR program as the board chair of the Coastal Nations Coast Guard Auxiliary and is regularly asked to do presentations about the organization. Most recently, he spoke at a meeting of the International Maritime Rescue Federation in Victoria.

The rapport with the Canadian Coast Guard has come a long way in eight years from what “was a bare-minimum relationship, that was more or less ‘you go your way, I go my way,’ you know?” Dick says. Whether it was a change of the guard, or a change in attitude and understanding, he says that now they’re “putting trust in one another.” Adding, “it’s a working relationship … that is so rewarding for both sides.”

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That working relationship was put to practice in a dramatic rescue on January 25, 2022. A water taxi en route to Ahousaht slammed into a rock, thrusting its four passengers, who were sitting on bench seats, forward into the next row, and the driver into the windscreen. The driver managed to get a Mayday out and both the Ahousaht Coast Guard Auxiliary and the Tofino-based coast guard responded. Tom Stere, rescue specialist at the Tofino station, quickly dispatched with another crewman and headed to the scene. The seas were calm, but dense fog swathed the coast, cutting visibility to just 15 meters, if that. When they arrived, the Ahousaht coast guard crew was already on site, tied alongside the damaged boat, and assessing the scene. “Because of their training, the communication was seamless,” says Stere. As senior officer, he took charge of the response and tasked the Ahousaht members with various roles. By this time, other private vessels from Ahousaht had arrived, too, ready to offer assistance as needed.

It was a chaotic scene. There were multiple injuries in a very small space filled with gear and bent seats, so extraction was challenging. The passengers had numerous broken bones, including one woman with a severely traumatized face, and the captain had a head injury. To add to the challenge, a bottle of dish soap had exploded, and the interior was slick with detergent, blood, and broken glass.

Working together, the teams extracted the passengers, got them ready for transport, and sent them to Tofino on the boats standing by. All but one of the passengers were medevacked out of Tofino for treatment.

For Stere, it was a game changer having the Ahousaht team. “To be frank, it reduced my anxiety,” he says. He knew he had competent people on scene, with the appropriate gear—first aid, stretchers, pumps, for instance—with complementary training. “They’re a critical component of our [search and rescue] response, without question,” he says.

Stere has lived in Tofino for 37 years and has been with the coast guard for 33. He’s pleased to see the new, formalized relationship and the acknowledgment that these communities have always been there to rescue people in their territorial waters. “It’s a major shift in the culture and mindset of the coast guard,” he says, adding that it’s permeating throughout the organization.

Carrow agrees. Ever mindful that CNSAR funding could be cut with a change of government, he’s working to ensure that it’s not just Carrow and his team who have the relationships. “They need to be held throughout the coast guard, from the newest employee to the most senior executive,” he says. Exposure to the program will make its importance crystal clear, he contends. What we’re doing with CNSAR is not trivial, not lip service, he says. “[The program] is working and we’re saving lives.”

The successes of the CNSAR program spurred its expansion across Canada in 2022 with the second phase of the Oceans Protection Plan. Today, the Canadian Coast Guard has Indigenous search and rescue programs under development on the Atlantic coast and in the “central region,” which encompasses Ontario, Quebec, and the Arctic coast.

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For a government that has made many promises around reconciling past injustices with First Nations people, it would be convenient to point to the CNSAR program as proof of progress, a box checked. While the initiative has clearly shown success, Carrow is cautious about using the word reconciliation lightly. True reconciliation doesn’t come with a program, he says. “It’s got to be a personal relationship.” Building relationships and trust takes time, especially with government.

After almost a decade working closely with Carrow and the CNSAR program, Dick can feel the shift. He’s experienced new levels of openness and trust, and he sees an agency committed to more meaningful involvement with First Nations. “Not just to see them, but to hear them,” he says.

Acknowledging past harms and how they can reverberate for generations often takes time, too. In November 2012, after petitions by the Hesquiaht First Nation, the BC government “expressed regret” to the Hesquiaht people and the families of John Anayitzachist and Katkinna for their wrongful hangings 143 years before. The federal government also exonerated the men in 2018.

Before these apologies, in 2008, master carver Tim Paul erected a pole in honor of his relative Anayitzachist on the beach at Homais, the place where he was hanged. It depicts a shark, an octopus, and, on top, Anayitzachist. Though its vibrant blue-and-red paint has now mostly faded to silver, the pole still stands, its base carpeted by a lush growth of thimbleberry and salal. Anayitzachist looks out to sea, watching for those passing by and those who might land on this shore.

When Arvid Pardo, a Maltese diplomat, took the floor at the United Nations General Assembly in New York in 1967 and began speaking at length on international law, the room was sparsely populated. Pardo was undeterred.

The deep, dark ocean, he said, is the womb of life. “We still bear in our bodies—in our blood, in the salty bitterness of our tears—the marks of this remote past.” With technology fast progressing, “man, the present dominator of the emerged earth, is now returning to the ocean depths. His penetration of the deep could mark the beginning of the end for man, and indeed for life as we know it on this Earth; it could also be a unique opportunity to lay solid foundations for a peaceful and increasingly prosperous future for all peoples.”

Pardo argued that the deep seafloor falls outside the territory of any state. As humanity raced to exploit the “immeasurable wealth” already known to be hiding there, Pardo said that wealth should be viewed as the common heritage of humankind.

At a time when countries around the world were grappling with the Cold War along with the lingering consequences of colonization and exploitative resource extraction, Pardo’s treatise struck a nerve. After all, who should have access to the deep? Who should benefit from its wealth?

His speech—later characterized by historians as a “you should have been there” moment—set the stage for nearly a decade of negotiations. Eventually, those discussions resulted in the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) containing this language: that any industrial activity on the international seafloor must “be carried out for the benefit of mankind as a whole.”

Today, with deep-sea mining companies closing in on mineral-rich rocks called polymetallic nodules, policymakers at the International Seabed Authority (ISA)—the intergovernmental body that governs activities on the seafloor in international waters—are still grappling with the challenge passed down by Pardo. If the resources on the international seafloor are the common heritage of humankind, as UNCLOS states they are, then what, exactly, does that mean? With little to no precedent to rely on, and with the reality of deep-sea mining inching ever closer, the ISA and its member states are in the process of figuring out how to make deep-sea mining work for all of humanity.

At a practical level, this huge responsibility is in the hands of just 15 people—the state representatives who make up a working group at the ISA, uninspiringly called the Finance Committee. The Finance Committee meets in private, with limited public reporting of its deliberations. Observers have called for the Finance Committee to have greater transparency.

According to an ISA technical study, the Finance Committee is currently exploring two main options for sharing financial benefits. One involves distributing any leftover proceeds from deep-sea mining to world governments, with countries that have large populations and low incomes getting more money than smaller, wealthier ones.

Crucially, the money being disbursed would be what’s left after the mining company and its sponsoring state have made their profits, after the administrative costs of running the ISA have been accounted for, and after any compensation is paid out to countries negatively affected by mining.

In its own analyses, the ISA uses US $500-million as a benchmark for discussing how to equitably share benefits among nations. But one independent economic forecast estimates that the actual amount available for benefit sharing could fall between $14-million and $228-million each year. That study found that countries like India could receive about $1-million annually, while Pacific Island nations, such as Kiribati, might receive as little as $7,500.

The ISA’s second option to make deep-sea mining benefit all of humanity involves channeling the leftover proceeds into a fund that could be used to pay for scientific research and address the environmental harms caused by seabed mining.

The risk with this approach, says Aline Jaeckel, an expert in deep-sea mining regulations at the University of Wollongong in Australia, is ensuring the money genuinely benefits humanity, rather than being used to clean up the problems created by deep-sea mining itself.

But both approaches, says Jaeckel, miss the bigger picture. The deep sea is home to an incredible amount of life—much of which has yet to be discovered by scientists, let alone fully understood.

Recently, a treatment for brain cancer was sourced from microbes living on the ocean floor, while enzymes found in bacteria near hydrothermal vents were used to develop tests for COVID-19. Even polymetallic nodules—the very objects deep-sea miners covet—may play a role in oxygenating the deep ocean. Narrowly focusing on the financial benefits of deep-sea mining, says Jaeckel, misses what else the deep sea already provides, or could provide in the future.

The ISA’s approaches to interpreting the deep seafloor as the common heritage of humanity also fail to leave room for Indigenous rights to the deep sea. In some countries, terrestrial mining operations are required to financially benefit local Indigenous communities. But the benefit-sharing mechanisms currently under discussion at the ISA do not specifically account for the people who might be most directly affected by seabed mining, such as those from Pacific Island nations. Instead, it’s up to states to compensate people who might be particularly affected by mining.

Neil Craik, an expert in international environmental law at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, says that with so much uncertainty around the environmental consequences of seabed mining, and limited information on the economic benefits, “one of the big questions states must ask themselves is if [seabed mining] is worth it.”

When I first see the canoe, in May, it takes a moment to distinguish the long, shapely slab of cedar from the patch of earth that has spent more than a century trying to reclaim it. Covered in moss and ravaged by decades of slow rot, the narrow boat lay in the same spot where Indigenous Alaskans had carved it from the trunk of a western red cedar. They did this in the place where the tree fell—first by cutting it into two pieces, then by fashioning the canoe from the lower portion of the tree so that it sits between the stump and the abandoned upper part of the trunk like a philosophical question made real: excised and reshaped but never moved from where it fell, is it not still part of the tree? Seaworthy but destined never to touch the sea, is it not still a boat?

I’d traveled halfway around the world for a glimpse of this forest-floor tableau: a long flight from my home in Tokyo, Japan, to Seattle, Washington, followed by a shorter trip to Ketchikan, a small town in southeast Alaska where I spent much of my childhood. From there, a very small plane took me to Prince of Wales Island to meet my guide, Stormy Hamar, who shepherded me to the canoe site by car, then on a small skiff powered by a 60-horsepower outboard engine, and eventually on foot. With no clear path to follow, we made our own way from the shoreline to the island’s lush, hilly interior, climbing over trees felled by wind, crawling beneath spiky tendrils of devil’s club, passing through shallow streams and around walls of dense brush. The canoe’s location, deep in the wild, is a closely guarded secret meant to protect the unique archaeological site from adventure-seeking tourists. Hamar—also known by his Haida name, Gitáang—agreed to take me in part because of my Tlingit heritage, which makes my history entwined with that of his own Haida ancestors, who are thought to have carved the canoe roughly 140 years ago before abandoning it for reasons we will never know.

A grim weather forecast made it necessary to rush from the airstrip to the canoe site, still dressed in the slacks and shirt I put on for my flight out of Tokyo. Hamar, who is 57, wears black Carhartt pants, a patterned knit sweater, and a pair of round-framed eyeglasses beneath a broad-brimmed hat made from woven red cedar bark. A thick handlebar mustache and large pistol and holster strapped to his side reinforce his outdoorsman bona fides.

He first heard about this place over a decade earlier, he tells me, from a local man who stumbled upon it while scouting the island for a prospective helicopter logging operation. This man was employed by one of 13 Alaska Native regional corporations tasked with managing tribal assets and investments for enrolled Indigenous beneficiaries throughout the state: in this case, the Sealaska Corporation, which represents the interests of Tlingit and Haida shareholders like Hamar and me. For decades, much of Sealaska’s revenue has been tied to the extraction of resources from its significant landholdings, including the patch of old-growth forest where the canoe was found. The scout who discovered the site was far from the waterline, high up in the kind of steep terrain considered ideal for helicopter logging, when he noticed an unusual number of stumps for a site where cutting had not yet begun. Then he noticed that many of the fallen logs next to those stumps were missing sections of their trunks up to 10 meters long. Only after finding a single canoe that had been carved but not hauled away did he realize where the missing sections had gone.

Sealaska abandoned its plans to log the site and brought in a handful of people by helicopter to help decide what to do with the canoe. Hamar, who lives in the nearby village of Kasaan and is active in tribal and community affairs, was among them. By the time he got his first glimpse of the canoe, Hamar had already studied traditional Haida boatmaking techniques long enough to know he was looking at something special.

One thing in particular caught his attention. Traditionally, once dugout canoes have been carved from a single cedar or spruce log, they are filled with seawater and heated rocks to produce a water vapor that is then trapped beneath a heavy tarp made from woven cedar, causing the wood to expand and the boat to become much broader and stronger. This canoe’s narrow hull and shallow interior told Hamar that its creators had finished the carving work but abandoned the boat before carrying out the steaming process. Because wooden boats don’t typically last long in wet environments—and because Alaska’s southeastern archipelago is largely temperate rainforest—unfinished canoes are rare in the archaeological record. This and others found in coastal British Columbia and Alaska stand apart from canoes preserved in museums or built by modern craftspeople for the clues they may offer about boatmaking traditions lost during the period after colonization and before post-assimilation initiatives aimed at preserving Alaska Native culture. In particular, this canoe offers insight into the vital step before steaming, a process that changes a boat’s shape considerably.

“When we look at the old canoe in the woods, even though it’s falling apart and there’s not too much left of it, there may be things we can learn from it, especially relating to the shape,” Hamar says. “It may have hidden secrets.”

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Hamar has not been to the canoe site in well over a year, so one of the obstacles we must overcome to get there is his imperfect memory. There is no path, after all, and whatever brush he cleared the last time is by now overgrown. False landmarks lead us astray, and areas that have become impassable since his last visit force us to turn back more than once. As he leads the way, I think about our pairing through the lens of history. For thousands of years, our Tlingit and Haida ancestors fought bitterly over resources and power, resulting in two quasi-nomadic societies that had lived so close to one another, for so long, that our cultures became nearly indistinguishable. Identifying a totem pole as Tlingit rather than Haida, or a canoe as Haida rather than Tlingit, requires real expertise, and sometimes hinges on knowing which tribe controlled the area at the time it was made.

Canoes were among the most important objects made by Tlingit, Haida, and Tsimshian people, whose way of life depended on navigating the inhospitable geography of what is now southeast Alaska and coastal British Columbia. The region’s dense temperate rainforest and snowy peaks are spread out across more than 1,100 islands, separated by broad ocean channels, winding rivers, and narrow streams. Moving through this network of sinuous waterways was so important that each tribe developed a range of sophisticated canoes: some meant for trade or warfare; some for hunting, fishing, and foraging; others for moving large numbers of people from the clan’s winter village to its summer one. Some were suitable for traveling long distances on the open ocean; others engineered for speed, stealth, or stability in rough waters. The largest war canoes held 60 or more people, while the smallest vessels carried only a lone pilot. Large or small, all were dugout-style canoes.

The Tlingit and Haida were especially renowned canoe carvers, in part because they so relied on them, and in part because they had access to arguably the best trees of all the coastal tribes of the Pacific Northwest. One Spaniard sailing through the region in the late 1700s wrote that the canoes were “exactly proportioned” and “extremely light and strong and very well shaped.” Initially, the arrival of Europeans meant that more canoes were needed to satisfy the demand for fur from otters and seals, which could be most effectively hunted from this sort of vessel. Later, as trade with Europeans led to the spread of diseases such as smallpox, and as white missionaries sought to replace Indigenous culture with Christianity and commerce, traditions like the carving of canoes and totem poles suffered. In 1884, Canada’s government outlawed the Indigenous funerary and gift-giving celebration known as the potlatch, for which new canoes and totem poles were often made. Demand for both subsided.

Still, the traditions never fully disappeared. When Hamar was a kid in the 1970s and early ’80s, living in a float house anchored off the coast of Prince of Wales Island, he and his brother mounted an outboard motor on a crude dugout canoe they found washed up on the beach and piloted it to and from school. Then, around 2008, he apprenticed under the late Tsimshian master carver Stan Marsden. Marsden was part of a generation of carvers who carried on the renaissance that emerged from a New Deal program, which funded training for Alaska Natives to craft totem poles for parks. His last totem pole still stands in front of the school in Kasaan, reminding Hamar of how Marsden’s mentorship helped him navigate a difficult time in his life.

“It was essentially a time of healing for me,” Hamar says. “He put me to work as a volunteer, and I just spent my days there for over a year helping him on that totem pole. I learned a lot from him, and not just about carving.”

Hamar and his family had recently moved to Kasaan from a nearby village, and he had quit logging, a trade he learned from his father before the clearcutting years of Alaska’s timber boom. “Somewhere in that time period, I really just made a shift in my life and committed myself to carving canoes and totem poles and basically doing as many cultural activities as I could think of,” Hamar says. Today, he crafts canoes in a covered tent behind his home, and compiles scrapbooks filled with archival photographs, articles, and other research materials on canoe building. Through his research, he tells me, he became increasingly fascinated by the gaps in passed-down knowledge that resulted from efforts to erase and outlaw Tlingit and Haida culture.

Hamar’s quest to fill in these gaps has drawn us deep into the forest in old Haida territory, where we suddenly come across the abandoned canoe. At first, my eyes struggle to discern its shape, in the same way they seek out the familiar contours of my bedside lamp when I wake in pitch blackness. Once revealed to me, though, the outline of the vessel is so obvious that it could almost serve as the model for an emoji of a canoe. The effect of seeing it in the wild is jarring in a way I had not expected. Instead of resting behind glass in a sterile museum, where its context would depend on educational placards and set decoration to make it appear as a kind of enormous diorama, the object stands before me in the only place it has ever existed. The craftspeople who shaped it, now long dead, had done the work here, in this very forest.

“They very well may have been sleeping around here somewhere,” Hamar says. “It seems like it would be most efficient to live here, you know, given the amount of time it would take to create the canoe.”

Long after its builders departed, the canoe remains more or less as they left it—raised off the ground by two logs that sit beneath it at either end like two massive sawhorses. Undisturbed, unstudied, and exposed to the elements, the canoe lay beneath a coat of moss and rot that, when Hamar first encountered it, made the matter of deciding its fate especially urgent. If the canoe was to be moved to a museum, it would need to be done before it rotted further, and with the understanding that the process itself could end up destroying the delicate vessel. Leaving it to the elements, on the other hand, would preserve the object in its natural surroundings but make its long-term preservation impossible and its study difficult.

“There’s one thought process, for example, that when a totem pole gets old and starts deteriorating, you kind of let it go back to the earth without interference,” Hamar says. “And then there’s another mindset that you would maintain it just like you might maintain your boat or your car. These are just opinions, of course, and I go back and forth, but essentially, I think it would be a shame if any information is lost, because we really don’t know the significance of what we might be losing.”

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In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, months after the last tourists had departed Kasaan, a solution to Hamar’s dilemma presented itself in the form of an unfamiliar vehicle that pulled up in front of his property. It was driven by a man named Jason Rucker, who was sailing through southeast Alaska with his wife. The pair stopped after noticing a huge cedar log near the tent where Hamar spends his days carving, and soon they found themselves in the middle of an impromptu tour. “It was really inspiring and moving,” Rucker says, “hearing him talk about his work on these canoes.”

Before they left, Hamar mentioned the decaying Haida canoe and his hope to document it for posterity. It was at this point that Rucker’s wife turned to him and said, you have to tell this guy what you do. “I have been into wooden boats, and worked on wooden boats, for my entire adult life,” Rucker tells me. For years, he had done repair and restoration work for the San Francisco Maritime Museum, where he also made specialized drawings of significant boats for the historical record. Called “lines drawings,” they resemble architectural renderings, but for maritime vessels.

“Not to get too poetic about it, but the way I think of it is that all those boats are telling part of the story of the evolution of [that type of] boat, and the variations of the boat,” Rucker says. “And the whole history of the boat.”

Rucker and Hamar stayed in touch. Before long, they’d secured a Maritime Heritage Grant, made available through Alaska’s Office of History and Archaeology, to document the canoe, and formalized the project under the umbrella of Hamar’s nonprofit, the Haida Canoe Revitalization Group. Then Rucker roped in Cultural Heritage Imaging, a San Francisco–based nonprofit that uses technology to create sophisticated digital images and 3D renderings of cultural artifacts, with an emphasis on helping Indigenous groups “take control of their own cultural narratives.”

When I speak with Mark Mudge, cofounder of Cultural Heritage Imaging, he underscores the significance of such efforts by recalling a trip to Nigeria to teach locals basic imaging skills for digitally preserving heritage artifacts. “We were at this beautiful Nigerian state museum,” he says. “I was given a tour and I thought, as we went along, That would be a nice thing to image, and that would be a nice thing to image.” But when Mudge asked the students themselves to choose something, they “brought back an object that I would never have selected in a million years.” Similarly, he tells me, the Haida canoe represents “a superb example of … enabling Indigenous communities to document what’s important to them,” as opposed to what’s of interest to anthropologists.

Creating high-resolution 3D images of cultural items is especially important in Alaska, where many people live in places with no road access, making it difficult to travel to museums to see artifacts taken from their communities. Cultural Heritage Imaging had already worked with the Alaska Native Heritage Center in Anchorage to write a grant and train staff as part of a broader effort to “digitally repatriate” hundreds of cultural materials before those objects are later physically repatriated to communities. If all goes according to plan, the digital reproductions will one day be freely available to anyone with an internet connection.

To create a similar digital rendering of the Haida canoe was a daunting proposition, given the remoteness of the site. It took years for the Haida Canoe Revitalization team to prepare. Finally, just a few days after my own visit, Rucker, Hamar, Hamar’s daughter Stephanie, and Stephanie’s four-year-old daughter are ready to make the journey, along with a pair of archaeologists and a graduate student from the University of Alaska Southeast, in Juneau. The weather, which had limited travel to and from Prince of Wales for days, suddenly clears.

At the canoe site, the team spreads out and gets to work. Rucker and Stephanie Hamar use a digital camera to photograph the boat, capturing tens of millions of measurements of spatial positions that will ultimately fit together like jigsaw pieces to produce a hyper-accurate 3D model. One of the archaeologists maps the area with a large drone equipped with lidar, a mapping technology that uses a laser capable of penetrating vegetation, while the other archaeologist and Stormy Hamar survey the site by foot. The pair confirms what the logger who found the site had suspected: not just one canoe but a whole fleet had been carved here, making it a kind of Haida boatyard.

Later that night, back at Hamar’s house, the team transmits hundreds of photographs to Mudge’s server in San Francisco, using the painfully slow internet available in Kasaan. As Mudge stitches the photos together, he identifies missing angles, and Rucker and Stephanie trudge back to the canoe site several times over the next few days to get the missing shots. Piece by piece, the secrets of the canoe hidden beneath decades of moss and decay begin to reveal themselves.

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On the last day of my visit, as Hamar had driven me from Kasaan to the small airstrip in Klawock, we’d stopped at another woodshop. The building wasn’t unlike a small airplane hangar, with a simple, sturdy construction and high ceilings, but instead of for an aircraft, it was made to accommodate a new totem pole that two men were carving. Inside, the men talked about local politics while shaping the massive log using adzes and other specialized tools. The overpowering scent of cedar shavings brought back childhood memories—of Tlingit halibut hooks and canoe paddles carved by my uncle, and countless totem poles and canoes I’d seen take shape in the southeast Alaska communities where I grew up.

A few weeks later, I send Hamar a text message from Tokyo, and get a swift reply saying he’s about to embark on a long canoe trip from Kasaan to Juneau to take part in Celebration 2024, a four-day Alaska Native festival. Since 2008, this decades-old biennial celebration of dancing, art, food, and fellowship has commenced with a “coming ashore ceremony” on a beach near Juneau. Paddlers from Kake, Ketchikan, Angoon, and elsewhere leave their homes days before, sometimes paddling hundreds of kilometers in hand-carved canoes to reach the beach. Many of the vessels were carved by what might be called ambitious novices, who have honed their craft through years of study and apprenticeship, trial and error.

These artisans and others like them are among those who might benefit from the work documenting and digitally preserving the canoe in the forest. Once the digital rendering is complete, carvers throughout the region will be able to access it from their own homes and communities, peering at the canoe’s precise measurements, or at cross-sections that show, for instance, how the bottom curve of the canoe corresponds perfectly with a growth ring deep in the heartwood of the cedar it came from. They’ll be able to see exactly how much girth was removed from the exterior of the tree before the carving began, or examine the nuances of how the hull was shaped before it was altered by steaming.

The canoe itself will stay in the forest where it was carved, rotting into soil, preserved only as drawings in a book or images on a computer screen. The team hopes to eventually take measurements and make similar digital models of other canoes—including up to 20 more found abandoned in forests in British Columbia and Alaska—creating an archive of boats from around the region.

Back in Tokyo, the first entry in this prospective digital archive reaches me via email. I open it and see the 3D rendering of the canoe, displayed in sharp yellow, green, and brown pixels. On my computer screen, the ghostly canoe rotates on command, over and over again. If I stare intently enough, I can conjure the familiar smell of a tree becoming timber and timber becoming totem.

A 3D digital rendering of the canoe in the forest. Video courtesy of the Haida Canoe Revitalization Group.

Earlier this year, Leticia Carvalho, a Brazilian oceanographer and environmental policy expert, took the helm of the International Seabed Authority (ISA) as secretary general. The ISA, an intergovernmental body that governs what happens on the seafloor in international waters, is responsible for an area that spans more than half the planet.

One of the agency’s key roles is in deciding the future of deep-sea mining, a nascent industry targeting tennis ball–sized rocks called polymetallic nodules. Rich in cobalt, nickel, and other valuable metals, polymetallic nodules can be found in some areas of the seafloor, most notably in the Clarion-Clipperton Zone, a vast tract between Hawai‘i and Mexico.

In a landslide victory, Carvalho unseated Michael Lodge, an English lawyer who had served as the ISA’s secretary general since 2016. Lodge’s tenure at the international body—which is tasked with the contradictory goals of both helping deep-sea mining get off the ground and keeping it in check—was marred by allegations of bribery, corruption, and of Lodge having an undue bias toward the mining companies the ISA oversees, all of which Lodge has vehemently denied. Many environmentalists and scientists welcomed the news of Lodge’s displacement.

In the wake of her win, Carvalho told Mongabay that she aims to rebuild trust in the ISA, and in Politico she said she planned to investigate the corruption and mismanagement allegations. But Carvalho’s term does not seem set to bring about the kinds of sweeping changes that would satisfy the 32 countries that have called for a pause on the development of deep-sea mining—including Canada, New Zealand, and Costa Rica—or those, like France, pushing for an outright ban.

For years after the ISA’s inception in 1996, environmentalists, mining industry representatives, and government delegates gathered at the agency’s seaside headquarters in Kingston, Jamaica, to develop the Mining Code—the set of rules and regulations that will govern everything about deep-sea mining from who is allowed to mine to how they will mine, and even the way the industry’s proceeds will be disbursed to, somehow, benefit all of humanity. For 25 years, deep-sea mining was a distant reality. Negotiations were easygoing, and those gathered in Jamaica would mingle at weekend retreats and dance parties.

All that changed in 2021 when representatives from Nauru, a Pacific Island nation, triggered a clause in the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) known as the “two-year rule.” The move meant that, suddenly, the ISA had only two years to either finish the Mining Code or consider a company’s application to exploit the seafloor with whatever unfinished rules it happened to have in place.

Three years later, no company has yet applied for an exploitation permit. But the triggering of the two-year rule sparked a flurry of contentious debates over the legal and environmental implications of deep-sea mining. With so much still under discussion, Julian Jackson, an ocean governance expert from the nonprofit Pew Charitable Trusts who has closely followed the negotiations, says the Mining Code is still months—or even years—from being finished.

“The ISA needs to be upfront with itself about where we are in this process,” he says.

Despite this, Carvalho says she expects member states to finalize the Mining Code by 2025.

Doing so will not be easy. To finish the Mining Code, negotiators must agree on—and draft into legalese—decisions that will have widespread consequences for sensitive deep-sea ecosystems, such as those in the Clarion-Clipperton Zone. They’ll also have to develop a system to ensure that the profits from deep-sea mining are distributed in a way that benefits all of humanity, as required by UNCLOS. Figuring out what that means and how it will work is just one of the daunting decisions facing negotiators.

Throughout 2024, the ISA worked overtime grappling with unanswered questions around the environmental impacts of mining. For instance, countries have not fully resolved what counts as “serious harm” to the marine environment, much less what level of harm regulators are willing to permit.

To finish the Mining Code, “a lot of compromises need to be made,” says Pradeep Singh, a legal expert on the law of the sea at the Research Institute for Sustainability in Potsdam, Germany.

Yet with negotiations nowhere near an end, the question becomes: what happens if a company submits an application to mine the deep?

The two-year rule requires the ISA to consider mining permits using its current draft regulations. Under normal circumstances, the Legal and Technical Commission, a closed-door body within the ISA, holds significant power to decide whether to approve or reject a mining application. But the ISA’s council, which represents 36 of the ISA’s 169 member states, recently implemented new safeguard measures. The council decided that if a mining application comes in before the regulations are finalized, the council will determine what procedures to put in place to review the application, rather than the Legal and Technical Commission.

The most likely candidate to test this unresolved process is the Metals Company (TMC), a mining company based in Vancouver, British Columbia. Despite initially triggering the two-year rule, TMC—along with its sponsoring state, Nauru—have so far held off on submitting a mining application. That will likely change in June 2025.

August 29, 2020, dawned clear over southwest Nova Scotia. In the cabin of his lobster boat, the Mystique Lady, Matthew Cope was chatting with the other members of his crew as they chugged out from shore. The vessel was bound for the area where Cope, a member of Millbrook First Nation, had set his 150 lobster traps the day before. Cope had prepared those traps with plastic-encased copies of his status card, bearing his name, photo, and registry number. On the back of each of card, Cope included the statement “These traps are being fished under section 4 of the 1752 peace and friendship treaty.” He was prepared for some trouble.

For years, Indigenous fishermen had been operating in the area, asserting their constitutional right to fish and sell lobster for a moderate livelihood—efforts that had received pushback from non-Indigenous fishermen and the Canadian government.

In the waning days of summer 2020, the situation had grown even more strained, and on the Mystique Lady, the atmosphere was tense. On the radar screen, Cope could see a Canadian Coast Guard vessel in the same area as his traps. Drawing closer, he found Fisheries and Oceans Canada (DFO) officers hauling the traps onto their boat. Cope tried the coast guard channel on CB radio, then hollered at the officers to call him (he’d put his phone number on the buoys). Finally, Cope pulled close enough to the boat to talk, and gave the officer what he calls “the whole spiel”—he said DFO must be aware that they were violating his constitutional rights, that there was a duty to uphold the promises of the treaties, that what they were doing was wrong.

“[The officer] said ‘Yeah well, we’re still going to take them.’”

Altogether, officers took 90 of Cope’s traps; back on land, Cope called the DFO office, demanding that the traps be returned. A week later, DFO invited him for an interview. In a cramped room, bare except for a container of cleaning wipes on the table, Cope sat down for an intermittently tense and congenial conversation, during which Cope told two officers he wasn’t hiding anything. “I don’t even know why my traps are still being held under investigation when I told you guys clearly up front exactly what I’m doing,” he said, according to a video of the interview.

One officer told Cope the court would have to decide whether what Cope had been doing was legally protected.

For decades, Canada’s most lucrative fisheries—including lobster and baby eel, or elver—have been the subject of a fraught national conversation over Indigenous rights recognition. In 1999, Canada’s Supreme Court confirmed that the Mi’kmaq, Wolastoqiyik, and Peskotomuhkati Nations of what is now the Gaspé and Maritime regions had the right to fish for a “moderate livelihood,” based on 18th-century treaties, vindicating communities who’d been fighting for fishing rights for decades.

But the court didn’t define a “moderate livelihood”—and the government has not implemented fisheries based on Indigenous rights since then. In that void, uncertainty has proliferated on the water, in the courts, and among fishermen who thought they were protected by treaties settled centuries ago.

In a statement, a DFO spokesperson said that the Supreme Court did not clearly define moderate livelihood, stating only that the right did not extend to the open-ended accumulation of wealth. “Each Treaty Nation has a unique vision for the implementation of their right to fish in pursuit of a moderate livelihood, and many Treaty Nations assert that defining this concept is the responsibility of each community. DFO works to further implement the Treaty right through the negotiation of agreements, programmatic initiatives, or other arrangements using tools that reflect Treaty Nations’ interests and visions.”

The statement also noted that in the last 21 years, DFO has provided $630 million to participating Indigenous communities to help develop fishing enterprises for multiple species, and that the Indigenous share of the $4.2 billion Atlantic fishery was 6.4 per cent as of 2021, up from 0.2 percent in 1999.

Cope, 38, grew up in the wake of the 1999 Marshall decision, as it is known, and as an adult has grown impatient waiting for the government to enact meaningful change in Indigenous fisheries.

In his interview with DFO in September 2020, Cope levied a challenge to the agency: either return his traps or charge him so that he could properly fight his case in court. The following winter, he received an answer: DFO charged Cope with fishing for lobster in a closed season, having lobster traps aboard his vessel during a closed commercial season, fishing for lobster without authorization, and not having the proper lobster tags. “I thought for sure that was going to make the courts answer some questions [about the right to a moderate livelihood],” Cope says.

Cope is one of a handful of Mi’kmaw fishermen challenging the constitutionality of Canada’s restrictions on Indigenous fishing. Dozens of Indigenous fishermen face charges in Canada’s Atlantic provinces—more than 50 in Nova Scotia alone—because they sought to exercise a right that the Marshall decision was supposed to have secured 25 years ago.

For some of these fishermen, the legal system is a last resort for resolving the questions that have plagued implementation of moderate-livelihood fisheries for decades. But the pursuit of these cases is stymied by costs and delays, leaving people like Cope torn between wanting to fight for their rights and feeling frustrated and fatigued by having to go through the process.

There’s a deeper tension at play too; some experts question whether funneling cases into the inherently adversarial—and colonial—legal system is even wise, or if it undermines the opportunity to achieve more peaceful coexistence.

Unquestionably, in the vacuum left by the lack of a political answer to the question of Indigenous fishing rights—which, for many nations, means the authority to manage their own fisheries—the issue will be sucked into the courts time and again. “It’s not a case where the courts are eagerly wanting to [get involved],” says Wayne MacKay, professor emeritus at Dalhousie University’s Schulich School of Law in Halifax. “They’re doing it as part of their duty, because the political levels of government have not solved it.”

These cases are fundamentally about promises made in treaties that were signed when Canada was not a nation but a British colony.

“[Canada] inherited these promises,” says Naiomi Metallic, professor at Dalhousie’s Schulich School of Law and member of Listuguj Mi’gmaq First Nation. “But you also had those promises reaffirmed by the Supreme Court in 1999. [The government has] an obligation to make good on their treaty obligations; they’re not doing that, and it’s forcing people into the criminal justice system.”

Cope and others didn’t go looking for a legal fight—they just wanted to fish. But in the troubled waters of fishing rights, they’re pushing back and asking, How will Canada honor those promises now?

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At Cope’s Millbrook First Nation home, about an hour from Halifax, his dog, a gentle cane corso named Cash, keeps watch. Cope disappears into the home office that abuts his kitchen and comes back with a document—a 50-page outline of his family tree, going back hundreds of years.

The tree’s most important detail is not its age but the name typed near the beginning: Jean Baptiste Cope, Chief of Shubenacadie, who on November 22, 1752, signed a treaty with the British.

Jean Baptiste Cope was born in 1698 to Paul and Cecile Kopit, and grew up speaking Mi’kmaw and French (Cope is an anglicized version of kopit, meaning beaver in Mi’kmaw). By his late 20s, he was Chief of the Shubenacadie District—an area covering roughly the middle third of the province—and soon became an influential figure in the wars fought between the British, the French, and the sovereign Indigenous nations who’d lived for millennia in what are now Canada’s Maritime provinces. (The French ultimately lost these wars, leading to the British domination of Atlantic Canada.)

The conflicts with Indigenous nations were brought to an end by a series of military alliance treaties with the British, called the Peace and Friendship Treaties, in the period from 1726 to 1779. One of these is the 1752 treaty signed in Halifax by Jean Baptiste Cope and Nova Scotia Governor Peregrine Hopson.

“He was smart enough and strategic enough to understand what the future was going to bring,” says Cope of his relative. “He knew that fishing trade was going to be a big part of the future, so he put it in the treaty.”

Those documents (and other treaties signed both before this and in later years with Indigenous nations across the country) underpin Canada as it exists today. “The constitution of Canada is built on the treaties themselves,” says Liam Smith, a lawyer in Nova Scotia who works primarily with Indigenous clients, including on constitutional challenges. But unlike treaties signed elsewhere in Canada, the Peace and Friendship Treaties did not involve any surrender of land or resources. Instead, they forged military and trade alliances, and guaranteed the right of Mi’kmaw, Wolastoqiyik, and Peskotomuhkati people to hunt, fish, farm, and earn a reasonable living without British interference. In the language of the 1752 treaty, it was a guarantee of “free liberty” of hunting and fishing, and of sale.

Two hundred years later, the 1999 Marshall decision cited these treaty rights. Donald Marshall Jr., a Mi’kmaw man from Membertou First Nation in Nova Scotia, was acquitted of catching and selling CAN $787 worth of adult eels without a license; his defense hinged on one of the Peace and Friendship treaties. In its decision, the court concluded that Marshall had a treaty right to a “moderate livelihood.” Not long after the decision, a commercial fishermen’s group applied for a rehearing of the case, and in November 1999, the court issued an unusual clarification called Marshall II. The clarification stated that the right to a moderate livelihood was not absolute and could be limited for conservation purposes or other “substantial public objectives.”

Cope’s appreciation of the treaties was kindled in the aftermath of Marshall. He’d always heard about treaty rights from his family but didn’t take them seriously until he started seeing, in Marshall and other court cases, that the treaties weren’t just pieces of paper, or fables from his father and grandfather, but living, mutually binding agreements.

Cope took particular pride in what he learned about how the Mi’kmaq hadn’t surrendered anything in the Peace and Friendship Treaties. Buoyed by that realization, Cope started amassing his own fishing gear, and secured his captain’s license. Three years later came the lobster trap incident and the DFO charges. Cope was ready to defend his treaty rights.

In Canada, section 35 of the Constitution Act, 1982 recognizes and affirms the Aboriginal and treaty rights of Indigenous peoples. To mount a constitutional challenge, Cope is arguing that the part of the Fisheries Act under which he’s been charged is unconstitutional. “I’m not going to let this go,” he says. “They haven’t heard the last from me yet.”

In doing so, he represents a younger generation of Mi’kmaw fishermen who are standing on the shoulders of Marshall—and who are not backing down from their rights.

But that doesn’t mean it’s easy.

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In May 2020, just a few months before Cope’s run-in with DFO on the water, Cregg Battiste and Kevin Bernard from the Eskasoni First Nation were fishing for elvers on Nova Scotia’s eastern shore. Fishery officers arrested them and seized their gear. Over a year later, DFO charged the pair with violating a federal fisheries order prohibiting the fishing of eels under 10 centimeters. The government had created the order just a couple of weeks before Battiste and Bernard went fishing, to halt what DFO said was “a threat to the conservation and protection of the species,” a stipulation introduced in Marshall II through which treaty rights could be limited.

So in May 2023, a familiar scene played out in a Nova Scotia courtroom. The pair sat with their lawyer, Jeremiah Raining Bird, at the front of a sparsely decorated room, responding to fisheries charges. Battiste and Bernard were there, in provincial court, to give notice that they would be arguing that the fisheries management order violated their constitutionally protected treaty right to catch and sell fish to earn a moderate livelihood, as per the 1999 Marshall decision. The trial is set for October 2025, though in November 2024 Raining Bird asked the court to be removed as counsel, saying he hadn’t been able reach his clients.

Either way, the fishermen will have the opportunity to make their case after waiting five years and four months, a reminder that constitutional challenges are far from straightforward. Mounting a challenge also takes more than time; it can cost a million dollars in lawyers’ fees and the cost of bringing in expert witnesses to go up against an opponent—the federal government, called the Crown, since Canada is a constitutional monarchy—with much deeper pockets.

Lawyer Liam Smith says these charges impose a significant burden on Indigenous fishermen, who are often individuals with limited means. “The Crown just burns them out, financially,” he says. “It has unlimited resources to defend itself.”

In the fall of 2019, William Nicholas, 62, and his son, Zachery, 38, were fishing for lobster in waters near their home in the Mi’kmaw community of Pictou Landing First Nation, in Nova Scotia, when DFO fishery officers arrested them for fishing during a closed commercial season.

Father and son had initially planned to challenge the charges on constitutional grounds. But as the 2024 trial approached, the Mi’kmaw fishermen notified the court that they were withdrawing their constitutional challenge and asked to be sentenced instead. Their reason was purely financial; they couldn’t afford to bring in legal experts to testify.

“We didn’t have enough money to take it to a higher court,” William Nicholas says. “We had no choice.”

Yet the decision to end their constitutional challenge still cost them.

For sentencing, the judge for the case had ordered a pre-sentence report, called a Gladue report, outlining the defendants’ Indigenous background and circumstances. The report found that William and Zachery had experienced the kind of adverse circumstances that have impacted Indigenous communities since colonization—including racism, denial of treaty rights, and historical trauma—which the Nicholases hoped would lead to a reduced fine. Nonetheless, Judge Alain Bégin sided with the federal prosecutor’s recommendation and fined them a total of $4,000. The process left the father and son disillusioned.

At its core, litigation sets up adversarial, zero-sum arguments, says Nicole O’Byrne, constitutional historian and law professor at the University of New Brunswick. “It’s the opposite of what the treaty relationship is supposed to be about,” O’Byrne says. Treaties were meant to establish a framework for a relationship between self-governing parties. But courts are a blunt instrument imposed from outside that leaves no room for discussion.

One fundamental disadvantage of the legal system is that it heightens distrust and damages relationships, says Western University legal scholar Michael Coyle. And while courts play an important role in parsing constitutional boundaries, they weren’t created to deal with multifaceted disputes that require continued coexistence (think of what happens to a separating couple who ratchet up the rhetoric in a divorce trial). “That is antithetical to reconciliation between peoples who are going to be living together for a long time,” Coyle says.

Another case shows the limits of the courts in reaching a resolution.

In July 2020, Jason Lamrock, a member of the Wasoqopa’q (Acadia) First Nation, was heading back to shore on Nova Scotia’s southwestern coast with a load of lobster when DFO fishery officers arrested him and seized his boat, gear, and catch.

According to court documents (Lamrock declined an interview), he informed the fishery officers that as a Mi’kmaw, he was practicing his treaty right to catch and sell lobster to earn a moderate livelihood. Yet he was charged nonetheless for illegally fishing for lobster during a closed commercial season.

Lamrock pleaded guilty to the fishery offenses and was referred to a sentencing circle (an alternative to the formal court process, which offers non-binding recommendations to the judge), organized by the Mi’kmaw Legal Support Network.

In June 2023, a circle composed of Lamrock, Mi’kmaw community members, and members of the justice system gathered and—according to the sentencing circle report—Lamrock told those assembled that “his intention was to go fish lobster in support of fellow Indigenous fishermen and (their) inherent right to fish.”

After hearing from Lamrock, the sentencing circle participants recommended that DFO write a letter of apology to him, return his boat and gear, and pay him the full year of wages he would have earned if his boat and gear hadn’t been seized. But a month later, when the sentencing itself took place in provincial court, the judge said that he was vacating Lamrock’s guilty plea because, in Lamrock’s statement to the circle about his intention to assert fishing rights, the judge saw no admission of guilt.

That sent Lamrock back to square one. He’s now fighting the charge on constitutional grounds; a trial date has not yet been set.

Lamrock’s case reflects a process that—by playing out in the criminal justice system—makes criminals out of people attempting to resolve a political dispute. And even in the best-case scenario for Lamrock, Cope, and the other fishermen pursuing constitutional challenges, the impact of a victory would be limited. If the court finds a regulation unconstitutional—meaning DFO officers enforced a regulation that infringed someone’s treaty rights—the charge is simply dropped. That could be a good outcome for someone like Cope, whose constitutional challenge is set to have its dates pinned down at a court appearance in 2025, but it doesn’t pave the way to a precedent that would finally define Indigenous fishing rights.

Another option with the potential for broader impact is to launch a civil case—specifically, a class action lawsuit (a civil suit on behalf of a group of people).

Class action lawsuits are an avenue fishermen have attempted to use before; in 2015, DFO charged a Mi’kmaw man named Hubert Francis, from Elsipogtog First Nation in New Brunswick, with fishing shrimp without a license. In court, Francis quoted from the Marshall decision—his only defense as he couldn’t afford a lawyer—but was convicted of fishing without a license regardless.

In response, Francis attempted to mount a civil case—a class action on behalf of all Mi’kmaq—to clarify fishing rights and require justification of infringement of those rights. But lacking funds (despite an unsuccessful bid for the government to cover costs, as it sometimes does on issues of exceptional public interest), the class action petered out.

Nonetheless, Cope sees Francis’s case as a source of inspiration: if he’s successful with his constitutional challenge—and can therefore make the case that the government knowingly hindered the exercise of his rights—he hopes to then launch a class action to set a broader precedent. Although, by his estimate, doing so could cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. “We’re going to go the whole nine yards,” he says. “I don’t care how much it costs.”

For some groups, the more promising route has involved stepping outside the legal system.

In June 2024, Sipekne’katik First Nation, in Nova Scotia, was three years into a lawsuit claiming that the Fisheries Act infringed on its community’s rights to fish, when the band and the Attorney General of Canada decided to change tack and focus on mediation instead.

In their request for an adjournment, Canada and Sipekne’katik said the pause was necessary to engender trust. The judge, Chief Justice John Keith, agreed that reconciliation is better achieved through negotiation and gave the parties until December 2024 to put together a mediated solution. A commercial fishermen’s association, the Unified Fisheries Conservation Alliance, opposed the application, saying the court was the only body that would deliver an unbiased decision and direction to follow; that group has since filed a lawsuit against Sipekne’katik’s chief and the Attorney General of Canada, citing a need for legal clarity.

Either way, as Marshall remains—from the Mi’kmaw perspective—unimplemented, tensions have simmered and occasionally erupted. Mi’kmaw fishermen have reported feeling profiled and harassed by fisheries officers, including in March 2024 when two Mi’kmaw harvesters fishing for eels were arrested and then left at a gas station—hours from home, without their phones or shoes—a situation the Assembly of Nova Scotia Mi’kmaw Chiefs has said reflected systemic racism that went beyond a few officers. (In July 2024, the federal fisheries minister announced there would be a comprehensive external review of the incident.) After that, some fisheries officers refused to report for duty, citing unsafe working conditions—compounded, they said, by the fisheries minister’s statements—and a rise in violence and threats from unlicensed fishermen. (Some Indigenous fishermen are among those whom DFO considers unauthorized.) Meanwhile, commercial fishermen have complained of increased poaching, with some reporting they’ve abandoned fishing grounds as a result.

For some scholars, these situations speak to a need for greater treaty education in the legal system, the federal government, and the general public. “When you get non-Indigenous people starting to understand that [there are] problems with the system, and that these problems go back hundreds of years … then we’re going to start getting some movement forward,” says University of New Brunswick professor Nicole O’Bryne.

That societal shift is happening in other contexts. Recently, negotiations culminated in British Columbia’s recognition of the Haida Nation’s title to the lands of Haida Gwaii, giving the Nation control over what was formerly considered provincially owned land; negotiations with Canada over Haida rights to control the waters around Haida Gwaii are ongoing. Provincial government officials said pursuing a negotiated agreement produced a clearer (and less expensive) outcome than a court decision would have.

Negotiation through mediation has an additional benefit; in a potentially adversarial situation, people are more likely to abide by an arrangement they’ve contributed to than one imposed by a third party, says Western University’s Michael Coyle.

But to even begin negotiating, there has to be trust. And for some fishermen, trust is a long way off.

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In July 2024, Cope was once again in court—not for the constitutional challenge but for charges laid while he was lobster fishing on Nova Scotia’s North Shore in September 2023.

In the years since Cope’s first charges, in 2021, the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples had become law in Canada, and Canada’s Senate had released Peace on the Water, a report urging a new approach to Indigenous fisheries.

Yet in court it seemed that little had changed, and Cope was flabbergasted to be facing new charges—even more so when he learned, through the disclosure of the prosecution’s evidence, the extent of Fisheries and Oceans Canada’s surveillance for the month he was fishing: drones, aerial surveillance, trackers on the boats, officers taking photographs from the woods.

“The honor of the Crown is at stake,” says Cope. “That’s all I keep thinking when I look at [this disclosure].”

In a statement, a spokesperson for DFO said that “fishery officers use a progressive approach to enforcement, beginning with education. All fishing activity is subject to compliance verification by fishery officers, who conduct inspections across all fisheries regulated by the Department.”

The statement said that DFO’s approach to regulating fishing is consistent with the Marshall decisions, including Marshall II. Marshall II clarified that in addition to conservation, regulatory authority extends to other substantial public objectives, including conservation of fishery resources. This spokesperson also said that in Marshall II, the Supreme Court  “noted that the best way to implement treaties is to consult and negotiate modern agreements with First Nations.”

The honor of the Crown forms the basis of Canada’s relationship with Indigenous people; it affirms that governments made treaty promises and are obliged to fulfill them, Mi’kmaw legal scholar Naiomi Metallic says. In some ways, it’s an abstract concept (with roots in the British notion that servants of the Crown must act honorably) underpinning the ethical and moral legitimacy of the state. But as more Indigenous nations and individuals assert their rights, that concept is also developing some muscle, Metallic says—including in July 2024, when the Supreme Court affirmed that Canada had breached treaties with the Anishinaabe of the upper Great Lakes, and that the honor of the Crown created a legal duty to negotiate compensation, after years of ignoring obligations.

In fishing, there’s a particular set of unfilled promises, having to do with the Marshall decision and the treaties before it; from the perspective of Mi’kmaw communities the government has yet to make good on the promise of fishing rights.

Honor is not the only thing at stake in this situation. There’s the health of fish stocks, and the well-being of Indigenous and non-Indigenous communities looking to make a living from them. Yet underpinning it all are the promises made when Europeans and the Mi’kmaq were first learning to live together on this land. Those promises are neither historical artifacts nor pure aspiration. They’re living ties, with benefits—and obligations—for both sides, and they persist. And so, decades after the court issued the Marshall decision, honoring those promises is the path by which a shared future will be built.

Nearly 200 of us cram into Tarāwhai, a traditional wooden Māori meeting house, under the gaze of the ancestors and deities carved into the posts and walls. We’re here in the home of the Ngāti Tarāwhai tribe, in the middle of the North Island of Aotearoa New Zealand, for the inaugural kura reo taiao gathering: five days of exploring our coasts, rivers, birds, and forests via the Māori language. Leaders and teachers sit up front, kids roam the floor. The people seated around me sport exquisite tattoos: living, breathing echoes of the carvings on all sides.

The day is hot and still, the front doors open to the lazy hum of a rural summer afternoon—the kihikihi of cicadas, the warbling of black-and-green honeyeaters called tūī, and a small plane droning above Lake Rotoiti. The buzz inside, though, sounds different from your usual Kiwi gathering. Everyone here is speaking te reo Māori, the language shared by all 120-odd Māori tribes. Even in a country where one in five people is Indigenous, hearing only te reo is rare.

Up front, the mood sharpens. People hush and lean in. Professor Rangi Mātāmua, from the Tūhoe people, holds a fist-sized volcanic stone taken from a nearby sacred mountain. He begins to chant: deep, rhythmical, fast, like water flowing from pool to pool. Herea Winitana (also Tūhoe) joins him. The two men lay their hands on the stone, infusing it with the mauri, the life force and essence of this gathering. We’re under a prohibition now: te reo only.

And so begins the world’s first kura reo taiao, which translates to ‘language school of the natural world.’ For the next five days, we’ll sleep side by side on the floor of the meeting house, rising before dawn to observe the stars or to explore oceanic navigation, fire, food gathering, spiritual lore, and more through te reo Māori. My fellow participants are conservation workers, native species recovery experts, educators, language specialists, trappers of invasive species. I spot a couple of TV personalities, a couple of YouTubers. Though we’re far from my home in Te Waipounamu, the South Island, it’s reassuring to see others from my own tribe, Ngāi Tahu. Almost everyone is Māori, and most are relatively young. This is the flourishing of decades of effort spent bringing te reo Māori out of the archives and remote villages and onto our tongues.

The language that evolved into te reo arrived in Aotearoa with the first humans in the 1200s. It’s a close cousin to the tongues of Tahiti and the Cook Islands, classified as part of the Austronesian language family. Classical Māori is especially rich in allusion, poetry, and metaphor that draw on the natural world. We explain people’s behaviors by likening them to the birds, the winds, the tides, the gods.

Starting in the 1840s, however, aggressive British colonization took aim at Māori language and culture. Disease, armed conflict, and land theft decimated Māori populations, while the 1867 Native Schools Act, designed to integrate Māori into white society, mandated schooling in English. Generations of teachers caned Māori children for slipping into their native tongue. Parents shielded their kids by choosing not to pass the language on; conversations stuttered, then ceased. By the 1970s, only five percent of Māori kids were fluent in te reo.

Settlers likewise hammered the ecosystems and species that help give the language its life. Today, by the New Zealand government’s own measure, 75 percent of the country’s native birds, bats, reptiles, and freshwater fish are threatened with extinction or at risk of becoming threatened.

All of this explains why, despite being a Māori journalist and author, I’m here as a second-language learner. When it’s time to divide ourselves into groups based on language proficiency, I choose group two of five: conversational but not fluent.

It’s commonly said that it takes one generation to lose a language, and three to get it back. My great-grandmother was fluent; her son, my grandfather, was raised by his paternal European grandparents and didn’t speak a word, which meant that his daughter, my mother, grew up with scant knowledge of te reo. Now, we have three generations learning at once. After years of stop-start lessons, my parents and I are studying intensively to support my five-year-old son, who attends a bilingual school.

But even a spoken language can be technically dead if its expressions are narrow and formulaic. Modern Māori overwhelmingly live in urban centers, largely divorced from the natural world our language rests upon. That’s one reason why this gathering booked out in days. People are hungry to decolonize their conservation work, and to recover the nuance, the poetry, and the collective, kinship-based worldview contained in the old people’s speech. The immediate goal is to reconnect our language to the natural world through the proverbs and vocabularies of old. Long-term, the goal is more ambitious: to revolutionize how Indigenous languages are taught by unifying language reclamation and conservation work.

But first, kai. Food.

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In Māori culture, a lot revolves around kai. When we go to the forest or coast, chances are it’s to harvest, hunt, or fish; almost everything we’ll eat at this gathering has been wild-caught. Feeding your guests is paramount, and every tribe has delicacies they’re famous for. As an icebreaker, language revitalization expert Paulette Tamati-Elliffe (of the Kāi Tahu people) asks for stories of favorite foods from each participant’s part of the country.

For some, it’s kūmara, Polynesian sweet potato; kōura, known as crayfish or rock lobster; or pūhā, a peppery watercress. For me it’s tītī, the sooty shearwater—a rich, oily seabird harvested from a scatter of remote southern islands that remain under our tribe’s control. Kāi Tahu tītī ā kai, tītī ā manawa, we say: ‘tītī are our food, tītī are our hearts,’ linking our stamina to birds which make 64,000-kilometer migrations each year. One man, when it’s his turn to answer, says deadpan, “I te taha o tōku pāpā, ko te tino kai, he tāngata,” and the class explodes with laughter: ‘on my dad’s side, our favorite food is people.’ (Yes, our ancestors ceremonially ate human flesh. But that’s an aspect of the culture no one is looking to revive.)

Tūmai Cassidy is another teacher for this session. He talks about how our people would travel for days to gather tuaki, cockles, to make a substitute for breast milk. At 22, his grasp of traditional knowledge is already advanced; there’s something compelling about old knowledge coming from one so young. But Tūmai has been steeped in both language and the natural world from a young age.

His mother, Tamati-Elliffe, grew up in the 1980s on the east coast of Te Waipounamu. She spent weekends outside her home city of Dunedin, knee-deep in the Manuherekia River harvesting eels, collecting pūhā from creeks, or filling buckets with shellfish at the coast. Her childhood was strongly Māori—but with little of the language. In their traditional village at Ōtākou, “te reo Māori [hadn’t] been spoken in well over 100 years,” Tamati-Elliffe says.

The tide began to turn in the early 1970s. Young Māori activists, in part inspired by overseas movements like the Black Panthers, staged marches, wrote petitions, and held occupations. Nationwide debates about past and present injustices drove the government to create forums for redress. Te reo was central throughout; in 1972, Māori leaders presented the New Zealand parliament with a landmark petition “humbly” asking that te reo be taught in schools. Soon after, te reo gained status as a nationally recognized language and was offered as an elective in schools.

Activists also realized that for the language to flourish, it had to be taught from birth. The first kōhanga reo, or language nest, opened in 1982. This preschool immersed Māori kids in their language, culture, and values from ages three to six. It was so successful that in just a few years, 415 kōhanga opened nationwide, run by families and communities. As the kids grew older, Māori schools followed, then tertiary institutions, like building new tracks ahead of a speeding train. The model has been reproduced worldwide; there are 32 language nests in Canada alone, where violent church- and government-led suppression of Indigenous languages mirrored that of Aotearoa New Zealand.

When Tamati-Elliffe met her future husband, Komene Cassidy, in the late 1990s in the midst of this revival, both aspired to be te reo–speaking grandparents. Tamati-Elliffe was too old to catch the kōhanga reo wave herself, so she and Komene had to work hard to build their own language skills and to provide a support system so their kids could live by Māori values and think Māori thoughts. “I talk about mahika kai, mahika reo [hunting and gathering for language],” Tamati-Elliffe later tells me. The family found community through the tribe’s language revitalization strategy (which Tamati-Elliffe now leads), and traveled far and wide to expand their knowledge, making eight-hour round trips to attend language immersion weekends. Being in nature was key.

Tamati-Elliffe’s traditional home settlement is a short drive from Dunedin, on the craggy Ōtākou Peninsula, surrounded by windswept ocean and beach. On their regular walks, a young Tūmai would point to things and ask in te reo, “Mum, what’s that?” At first, she could only reply: “he manu tērā [a bird].” She didn’t have the vocabulary—yet.

Once home, they would hunt for the missing language in dictionaries, old manuscripts and Māori newspapers, and legal documents and journals, or by asking native speakers from other tribes. Then they tried to use their discoveries the next time they went out. “I remember thinking, oh god, what was that kupu [word] again? And then he said it to me! ‘Māmā, titiro, he kapowai’ [Mum, look, a dragonfly!], and I was like, wow, this is cool, I’ve got my own traveling dictionary. Ka whāngai atu ki a rātou; then they feed it back to us.”

Beyond vocabulary, Tamati-Elliffe and other parents sought sayings that reflected Māori thought. Once, Tamati-Elliffe asked the late language expert Te Wharehuia Milroy how she would tell her kids not to “eat like a pig.”

“‘Kōtuku āta kai, pārera apu paru,’” Tamati-Elliffe recalls him replying. Literally, ‘white heron eating carefully, duck gorging on muck.’ “He started explaining the feeding behavior of those birds, and how it could be applied to encourage your child to eat like a chief.”

Tamati-Elliffe realized she knew little about the behavior of these birds, or indeed any of the creatures referred to in the language’s richest expressions. She and her family began building language and ecological knowledge in tandem. But places to build that knowledge were increasingly hard to find.

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If people from other parts of the world know anything about Aotearoa New Zealand, it’s often that we are a pristine, ecologically conscious country. One-third of our land enjoys a degree of environmental protection. Our forests, peaks, and rivers regularly star in Instagram feeds and Hollywood films. But to produce those stunning images, most of the country has to be cropped out of the frame.

The day before the kura reo taiao began, I had gone for a run along the shores of nearby Te Rotorua-nui-ā-Kahumatamomoe, Lake Rotorua. The waters were mirror-calm, broken only by a dark, shifting scatter of birds. A couple of kilometers offshore, the sacred island of Mokoia lay reflected in the lake. Centuries ago, the high-born Māori woman Hinemoa famously swam out to Mokoia at night to visit her lover. Though I lacked that enticement, the day was hot, and it was tempting to swim. But instead of plunging in, I pulled out my phone to check the national water quality website. Hello, cyanobacteria. The bay was closed. A proverb from this lake is Ko Hinemoa, ko ahau, ‘I am just like Hinemoa,’ meaning that I would risk everything for love. Had Hinemoa made her romantic swim today, she would have risked greeting her lover with an asthma attack, rash, vomiting, headache, tingling mouth, or trouble seeing. I headed back to my motel for a cold shower instead.

Since the early 2000s, Aotearoa’s rivers have increasingly been mined of their water and polluted with runoff. Autonomous, insectile irrigators spray water over the land. Swaths of the naturally arid plains of Te Waipounamu are now an artificially green mosaic peppered with dairy cows. The economics have been spectacular; dairy is now Aotearoa’s biggest export. But low river flows, high nitrate levels, and rising temperatures have created an increasingly hostile aquatic environment. Just under half the total length of our rivers are too polluted to swim in, while more than half of our lakes are cloudy, polluted, or prey to algal blooms.

Tamati-Elliffe grew up fishing and preserving eels. “We would go freedom camping in the summer, harvesting tuna [eels] on the Manuherekia [River]. I don’t know if you’d do that today,” she says. The Manuherekia, in inland Otago, is in dire health. Unlike most Aotearoa rivers, there’s no legal limit to how much water can be extracted, and irrigators have given themselves permission to siphon three-quarters of its flow. In dry periods, the river barely moves, leaving parts of its stony bed exposed like a skeleton’s vertebrae.

These are modern examples of an older, deeper spiritual hurt for Māori. The country’s once-vast labyrinth of wetlands is almost gone, drained by farmers for pastureland. Forest clearing and non-native mammals, including predators like stoats and possums, add to the devastation. We’ve already lost many of the subjects of our sayings, like the huia, a type of wattlebird, and koreke, the New Zealand quail. With the exception of seafood, most native species are now so rare that they require protection: it is either unsafe or illegal for Māori to eat many of our traditional foods.

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As the long summer days unfold, we sit (or walk, or dance) with one teacher after another, moving between this century and those past, from the meeting house to the mossy forests nearby. We’re not here to mourn historic losses; we’ve gathered to recover knowledge and celebrate what can be saved. Conversation and laughter roll around the whare kai, the dining hall, and you can hear the uproarious banter of the advanced language groups from kilometers off. Friendships and inside jokes form while puzzling out 19th-century texts. We learn about celestial navigation and oceangoing canoes, about styles of incantation used to invoke different gods, about ancient stories that explain modern scientific concepts like the water cycle. One day, in a light rain under an enormous rata tree, wildlife and ecology researcher Puke Timoti (Tūhoe) teaches us about timber and fire: How by day, eeling parties cached torches of slow-burning wood every five kilometers so they could travel long distances by night. How when a young woman was ready to find a husband, she’d gather the branches of different trees and light a small fire, then lie back and wait for eligible men to visit her house. Forget swiping right or left; she indicated her feelings by placing specific branches on the fire. Everyone in the village would be paying attention, sniffing the breeze. Acrid smoke? Rejected! The sweet aroma of swamp tōtara? Everybody knew she’d chosen her man.

Our hoots of laughter fill the forest, but I’m also reflective. All this ritual around fire, links to esoteric knowledge and genealogy, the humor and innuendo—today these riches collapse into the stark efficiency of striking a match. I’ve spent years living off-grid, where bringing in firewood is a daily winter chore; I understand why our ancestors embraced new ways. The challenge now is reconciling the old world with the new.

Most sessions include discussing and translating whakataukī. These often-cryptic, koan-like sayings are key carriers of cultural values. Timoti recites one we all know. Te manu e kai ana i te miro, nōnā te ngāhere. Te manu e kai ana i te mātauranga, nōnā te ao. ‘The bird that eats the berries of the miro tree, theirs is the forest; the bird that eats knowledge, theirs is the world.’ This always seemed useful and straightforward to me. But, Timoti explains, it was likely coined in the 1950s—a time when assimilationist government policy, laws that further dispossessed Māori of their land, and the pull of work and education drew Māori into cities. Many urbanized Māori lost daily access to native speakers and the lived knowledge that comes from growing and gathering your own kai. Many came to believe that English was the only way to get ahead.

Today, people are seeking the reverse. “Hokia ki tō kāinga,” Timoti says. ‘Go back to your village.’ People are seeking the miro berries: the old, grounded, ancestral knowledge specific to one’s people. Yes, I think. That’s what motivated me to return home after spending my 20s and 30s living in Melbourne, Australia. I was driven by curiosity, but also by other, more complex emotions.

The next morning, sitting on the meeting house steps listening to a particularly swift native speaker discuss spiritual concepts, I feel like I’m trying to catch a waterfall in my hands. While some drink deeply, I’m scribbling down unfamiliar terms, furtively thumbing the dictionary app on my phone. Feelings familiar to many Māori flicker through me: shame that I’m not fluent, sadness and anger that this birthright didn’t come to me as a child, excitement about the riches I do grasp, determination to keep learning. I studied te reo in high school, and more sporadically since then. In 2014, I began walking old Māori trails through the mountains for my book Uprising, seeking to understand and share how our ancestors experienced belonging and place. Since my son was born, I’ve moved back to my tribe’s territory and am now in full-time te reo immersion school. Patua te whakamā, we say. ‘Kill the shame.’ One day our family will understand everything, I tell myself. We just have to do the work.

It’s not just the hardcore language nerds doing that work either. Almost one-third of New Zealand students are actively learning te reo, while another third learn at least simple words, greetings, and songs. The rest of New Zealand society is increasingly exposed to te reo as well. The national broadcasters, Radio New Zealand and TVNZ, use te reo for introductions and segues. In a nation of five million, Whakaata Māori, the Māori TV station, averages 1.1 million viewers per month, of which two-thirds are non-Māori. Such exposure slowly adds up. A 2023 study from the University of Canterbury found that the average New Zealander could define about 70 Māori words. Even Disney movies are now released in te reo.

There’s still a long way to go. Only four percent of the population is fluent nationwide, and the current coalition government is actively hostile to both te reo and environmental protection. Once again, we are marching in the streets. But governments come and go, while language revitalization is intergenerational. Another member of our group is Kiri Danielle (of the Ngāti Kahungunu ki Wairarapa​, and Ngāti Raukawa ki Te Tonga tribes, and of European descent), an environmental lawyer, TV and radio personality, and the public face of Be a Tidy Kiwi, perhaps New Zealand’s best-known environmental campaign. “When the next government comes along, well, we’ll be stronger,” she tells me. “It’s far too late for [te reo] to diminish now.”

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Five decades after activists kick-started the language renaissance, the future of te reo seems increasingly assured. But what about the natural world on which it depends? To paraphrase the words of the late Tūhoe elder John Rangihau, there are more and more people speaking the Māori language, but fewer and fewer Māori things to speak about. Which is why restoring te taiao—the natural world—is essential. The long-term vision of the founder of the kura reo taiao, Tame Malcolm (Ngāti Tarāwhai), is to make language learning and environmental restoration inseparable. He wants the country’s planting and conservation programs all to involve learning te reo, and language programs nationwide to revolve around being in, and working for, the natural world. His tribe already employs a dozen of its members in conservation work, half of whom are fluent in the language, the other half learning.

For many of the participants at this first kura reo taiao, like Kiri Danielle, nature and language are already intertwined. Perhaps because of her experience as a TV host, Danielle has a quiet, enviable poise that she maintains even in gumboots, cleaning up other people’s trash. More than a decade ago, after divorcing her husband and leaving a strict religion, she ended up ostracized, frequently apart from her children, and ultimately homeless, sleeping in her car. In her darkest moments, beside bubbling mud pools where she would go to hide and cry, “I felt Papatūānuku [the earth mother], I felt her mauri [life force] comforting me, and I saw her beauty with fresh eyes,” she says. “Some people, from a Western point of view, they might say ‘kua pōrangi haere koe’ [you’re going crazy], but it was beautiful to me. I had fallen in love with Papatūānuku.” Since then, she’s “returned the healing,” hauling tons of old tires and couches and other rubbish from New Zealand’s environment alongside an army of volunteers. For years, she hosted a show where she returned people’s illegally dumped trash to their homes. Whenever she found herself confronting someone Māori, if she mentioned Papatūānuku, “they all hung their heads. Her name is very powerful. There’s still a reverence there.” As familiarity with the language grows, so does this reverence. The school kids she works with don’t find it crazy to talk about Papatūānuku at all.

For Paulette Tamati-Elliffe, her efforts to raise Tūmai and his siblings in te reo gained a profound boost in 1998 when their hapū, or sub-tribe, received Te Nohoaka o Tukiauau, a significant wetland, back from the Crown to manage on behalf of the tribe. Suddenly they had an ancestral landscape teeming with life to restore in their own backyard. “It wasn’t the Department of Conservation’s or anybody else’s,” she says. “It was ours.”

Tamati-Elliffe was quitting smoking at the time, and walking among the maze of waterways fringed by raupō reeds and yellow-flowering kōwhai trees, “I remember feeling like, oh my god, this place is the lungs of our environment, and how important it is to filter and clean everything.” Today the hapū runs a nursery, planting operations, pest control, and research programs in partnership with the University of Otago. The work offers myriad opportunities to use te reo daily and to regain intimate knowledge of the seasons and the birds.

It’s not just Tamati-Elliffe’s hapū either. Other tribes are making similar efforts, with 32 percent of Māori actively engaged in environmental restoration. One of the key supporters of the kura reo taiao is Predator Free 2050, an ambitious national organization aiming to rid Aotearoa of non-native predators by the year 2050. Though environmental losses still outweigh the gains, these combined efforts may someday reverse the declines of native species like the takahē, a colorful rail once declared extinct. In 2023, Ngāi Tahu leaders released nine breeding pairs onto land also returned by the Crown to our people: an example of ecological and cultural restoration working hand in hand.

Conservation doesn’t just aid ecosystems and language. It’s also important because it may one day reconnect Māori to more of our traditional food. Around the age of 11, for example, Tūmai asked why his family ate chicken from the supermarket instead of chiefly birds like kererū or weka. The answer, of course, was that the birds had been decimated by introduced predators and habitat loss, and were now protected by introduced conservation laws.

As Tūmai grew up, he became more and more fascinated by traditional food gathering. He started mining old books and manuscripts, then testing what he’d found in the bush. “He’d mapped out this weekend where we were on a hunt to find these fruiting tōtara trees,” Tamati-Elliffe recalls. “We found a few, and next minute he’s scaling up the tree and got his T-shirt up and it’s full of these berries, and he’s scaled back down the tree and starts eating them, and he’s telling me to try them, and I’m like, ‘kaua e kai e tama, kāore e tātou te mohio mēnā ka mate ka aha rānei!’ [Don’t eat them, son! We don’t know if you’ll die or what!].” He reassured his mother that he’d read accounts of the old people gathering 60 basketfuls for a feast.

In one workshop, Tamati-Elliffe, Tūmai, and Komene show participants how to make traditional food bags from bull kelp, pack them full of tuaki, cockles, and cook them over the fire. When we file into the dining hall that night, there’s a delicious smoky smell in the air. People crowd around the serving tables, reaching into the scorched kelp envelopes and eating the tuaki where they stand. I pry one of the fat shellfish open and gulp the lot in a salty, smoky burst. Heaven. Normally, a traditional dining hall is a cacophony of excited voices. Right now, it’s largely quiet, just the warm murmur of a new generation enjoying a very old type of feast.

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On the final day, thick clouds settle over the lake and hills. The sky darkens and pours with rain. We return to the meeting house for the poroporoaki, a closing forum for reflecting and giving thanks. Te Aorere Pēwhairangi (Ngāti Porou) gives a long, beautiful, hilarious speech praising Ngāti Tarāwhai for their renowned carving and hospitality—then closes with a tono, a request, to take the whatu mauri, the stone embodying the life force of this cause, to his people’s home in Tokomaru Bay. His tribe wants to host the next kura reo taiao.

His relations rise from the crowd to perform an electrifying haka, their bodies moving in unison, fists raised, eyes wide, a shouted dance expressing their unified determination and purpose. Though there’s a competing tono from another tribe, this show of strength wins the day. The next gathering will be held at Tokomaru Bay in just two months’ time.

And so, after a long round of goodbyes, we emerge, huddled against the rain, into a world where people do not all speak te reo, and not every conversation is about how to cherish te taiao, and where the lakes and rivers are not the ancestral ones, full of life, but those like Lake Rotorua, on our right as we drive back to the airport, increasingly poisoned by runoff and algal blooms. Translated into English, te reo Māori often sounds romantic, like poetry. And I know it’s romantic to imagine that one day we will relearn how to speak the language of the rivers and lakes, and stand in the shallows, and once more be invited to swim, and to drink. But that doesn’t stop me from imagining it all the same.

On the outskirts of town, we pass a McDonald’s; we pass logging trucks. A crude handmade sign beside the road reads “Handman. Holes in walls. I fix.” When my plane takes off, I watch the lake disappear below me, swallowed by cloud. I think about how each teacher offered us glimpses of an older, deeper intimacy with the natural world—taking us beyond grammar and vocabulary to Māori thought. Key has been the web of whakapapa that places us in relationship with every living thing, all the way back to the gods. Whakapapa is often translated as ‘genealogy.’ But it is richer than that, a tangled web of connection and reciprocity: being reminded, once again, to see the world as kin.

I am sitting at a slick Manhattan waterfront restaurant on the banks of the East River, New York City, trying to decide why I find the caviar pizza on the menu so disturbing.

Jonathan Haffmans, the executive chef of Industry Kitchen, is telling me how their extremely expensive signature “24K” pie is made. “First of all,” Haffmans says, “if you want it, you have to book it at least 48 hours in advance. It takes us that long to assemble all the ingredients.” When an order comes in (and there are around 15 to 20 requests a year), Haffmans begins by preparing a dough tinted black with squid ink. Once kneaded and shaped, a base of garlic crème fraiche and Stilton cheese is laid down. Then the artists adorn their canvas, applying topping after indulgent topping. Buds of Périgord truffles and wedges of foie gras fan out from the center. Gold leaf and edible flower petals flutter down to bring a little color. Finally, the pièce de résistance is administered: heaping spoonfuls of French platinum osetra caviar, distributed so that each of the pizza’s eight slices is anointed with some sturgeon eggs. When the check is finally dropped, diners can expect to pay US $2,000. For just $700, an additional heaping tablespoon of premium, yellow-tinted almas osetra will find its way onto your pizza.

That the 24K is meant to appeal to a certain kind of over-the-top client during this new Gilded Age is self-evident. With more than $16 trillion in stock market wealth created in the past 10 years alone, a couple thousand bucks is chump change to the Wall Street bros and sisses who work just three blocks south of Industry Kitchen. But the 24K is just one dish on a whole exploding menu of caviar options that have burst onto the internet and into real life in the last decade.

Plug “caviar” into TikTok or Instagram and you’ll likely encounter someone named Danielle Zaslavskaya, also known as the Caviar Queen. Clad in designer loungewear and diamond-heavy jewelry, the Ukrainian-born Zaslavskaya spreads caviar over whatever’s at hand—fish fingers, Doritos, Pringles—you name it. As the VP of Brand Partnerships for the caviar and luxury goods distributor Marky’s (and the granddaughter of the founder), she has plenty of supply on hand. These moments in turn feed more online moments shared by lower-grade influencers who emulate “their Queen.” Then the bots and algorithms take over, endlessly amplifying until all this caviar hysteria circles back to Industry Kitchen. A not insignificant portion of the 24K orders logged each year come from influencers, dropping by the East River to take their own publicized bite.

Whether on a Dorito or a $2,000 pizza, these ephemera add up to something real in the physical world of fish. Until relatively recently, salted sturgeon eggs (and sometimes eggs of salmon, paddlefish, or a handful of other fish species that fall into the caviar bucket) were a pricey but very niche menu item first popularized by Russian royalty in tsarist times. No more. Global caviar sales have surged 74 percent since 2020, especially during the early years of the COVID-19 pandemic, when the idea of a luxury-experience-in-a-can appealed to the restaurant-deprived. Caviar producers in California, Europe, and China recorded burgeoning profits, while the total volume of sturgeon product entering the United States—the world’s largest caviar producer—has also swelled. But, like matryoshka nesting dolls, an array of businesses fronted by influencers and marketed on all kinds of social media platforms manage to move vast amounts of fish eggs without ever getting anyone’s hands slimy.

@dzaslavsky Back to basics with my favorite Doritos and Caviar, cause duh…this time I used sour cream instead of cream fraiche and its also very BOMB. #doritosandcaviar #caviar #daniellemademedoit #snacktime ♬ original sound – DANIELLE

Caviar has become a topping that social media influencers will spread on mundane junk foods, such as Doritos.

So why do I find all this so disturbing? Why should I begrudge an entrepreneurial influencer her right to hawk sevruga-on-a-Pringle? Why should I not let every Wall Street titan have their gilded slice free of guilt?

I’m not sure at first, but I think it’s something coarse and fancy at the same time—something that is as bad for nature as it is good for a restaurant’s bottom line. In short, I think it has something to do with the Russian word poshlost’.

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I am holding my aching head, surveying the ruins of a banquet on the shores of the greatest sturgeon river in the world.

It is 1992 and I am at the Volga River in the Russian city of Volgograd (formerly Stalingrad). I am trying to make my undergraduate degree in Soviet studies earn me a little dough by working for a post-Soviet peace initiative that will bring me to post-Soviet Russia numerous times over the next four years. Before me, in accordance with what passes for swank at the time, is a bottle of Russian vodka, a bottle of Armenian cognac, a bottle of sweet Georgian wine, and a Pepsi. Also on the table are heaps of uneaten sturgeon caviar left over from one hell of a bender. The words of my Russian soon-to-be ex-wife rise up in my alcohol-soaked brain: “Foo, kakaya poshlost’.”

Yuck, what vulgarity.

Except, not quite vulgarity. Like many Russian words, poshlost’ requires a handful of English words to convey its complete meaning. When you unpack poshlost’ in full, you get something that also conveys an impression of ignorant status-yearning. A woman who is poshlaya is striving to rise above her station by pursuing a refinement that she can’t quite understand. Like caviar, for example. It was desperate striving poshlost’ that helped break caviar out of its Russian box in the 1980s and ignite a global trend.

For the better part of the 20th century, the Soviet Union had maintained a near monopoly on the caviar trade. Bureaucrats in Moscow knew its value very well. As a poor country in need of foreign currency to prop up its embryonic economy, the USSR was eager to monetize mink, gold, diamonds—anything that caught the attention of strivers in the West. Because of its association with the Russian nobility, who spent lavishly all over Europe before the 1917 Russian Revolution, caviar fell into that category.

This arrangement worked for the Soviets and the sturgeon, which can grow up to five meters long. Even though the 28 or so species of sturgeon that complete their life cycle by predictably migrating upriver to spawn are a kind of living fossil—essentially unchanged for over 200 million years of evolution—they are highly vulnerable to human exploitation. They generally don’t reach sexual maturity until approaching a decade of life. In the wild, every species of sturgeon on Earth is either threatened, endangered, or critically endangered, victims of the modern indignities of poor fisheries management, pollution, habitat destruction, and over-exploitation. An early-20th-century caviar frenzy, for instance, nearly obliterated these ancient fish up and down the American East Coast. But the Soviet government, when it existed, was a bit of a lifeline for wild sturgeon. Whereas Canada or the United States might declare a “conservation area” or a “national park” to protect native sturgeon species, the Soviets created zapovedniki: forbidden zones where the general public was banned. One of the Soviet Union’s very first zapovedniks—the Astrakhan Biosphere Nature Reserve—covers a territory where the mighty Volga River empties into Central Asia’s Caspian Sea in a myriad of swampy channels, prime egg-laying territory for sturgeon returning from the great inland sea. Iran also controls a huge swath of the Caspian Sea but has never been a guarantor of sturgeon conservation. Soviet Kontrol was therefore critical to maintaining the five species endemic to the region: the Persian (Acipenser persicus), Danube (A. gueldenstaedtii), starry (A. stellatus), fringebarbel (A. nudiventris), and—the most valuable of all—beluga (Huso huso).

With Soviet Communism’s decay in the 1980s and full-on collapse by the end of 1991, the country became what the Franco-Russian writer Emmanuel Carrère called “a paradise for resourceful hooligans.” Soon it seemed that anyone with a plane ticket to Astrakhan, Russia, a boat, and a knife could plunder sturgeon stocks. Richard Adams Carey, who did an extensive investigation into the black market caviar trade, reports in an excellent book rereleased this fall, The Philosopher Fish, that massive carcasses of these slow-growing, long-lived animals—slit open and stripped of their eggs—were discarded to rot all through the myriad channels of the savaged Volga delta.

The surge in illegal supply rippled out into Europe and as far away as the United States. “I had guys coming into the store,” recalls Ira Goller, owner of the locally famous Murray’s Sturgeon Shop on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. “They’d open up their coats and have cans and cans of the stuff. I didn’t want any part of it.” At one point, a caviar war broke out between Macy’s department store and Zabar’s, the bastion of Jewish “appetizing,” causing the price of caviar to drop and drop, eventually bottoming out at $8.56 an ounce. “You could walk down Broadway and there’d be these little plastic caviar containers all over the sidewalk,” Goller says. That’s how cheap it was.

Until there was none of it.

Alarmed at the precipitous decline in such a majestic and ancient group of fish as the Caspian sturgeon, in 2000 a consortium of US-based nonprofits launched a kind of pre-meme meme to get people to stop eating Caspian caviar. Branded “Caviar Emptor: Let the Connoisseur Beware,” the campaign sought to halt what it punned as the wild east’s Roe to Ruin. From 2001 to 2005, activists pushed for the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) to list Caspian sturgeon, which would severely curtail the global trade. (Listing by CITES rigorously limits international trade in animals and animal produce, and can effectively cauterize an artery of heretofore hemorrhaging exploitation.) CITES agreed—but the caviar industry pushed back, prompting CITES to delist beluga sturgeon. Legal trade never slowed, and the illegal trade likewise continued apace. In 2005, the United States banned trade in Caspian beluga caviar. The next year, CITES finally issued a complete and total ban on the trade of wild Caspian sturgeon caviar, though a year later, it reopened trade in osetra, sevruga, and beluga caviar. Despite some backpedaling, the great garish gold rush was over.

For the moment.

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I am standing beside a massive green tank in an industrial warehouse in rural North Carolina watching several hundred meter-long osetra sturgeon making excruciatingly repetitive loops around the huge tank. Around and around they go, diverging in their slow swim only to snatch the industrial feed pellets that periodically spray out of the automatic feeder at the center of the tank. Apart from the initial shock I feel when I first see these living dinosaurs, the overwhelming feeling that starts to come over me is boredom. I am not alone in this. In a 2015 study of boredom and its effects, researchers settled on an aquaculture training video as the best way to induce that deadening sensation.

But were it not for this boring, plodding advance in science, the Caviar Queen—who, I would venture, wouldn’t be caught dead in a place like this—might never have come into existence. For it wasn’t glamour or branding or high fashion that moved caviar from the absurdly expensive to just-kind-of-pricey category, but this: fish farming.

“It wasn’t easy,” the late Soviet-born scientist Sergei Doroshov told me back in 2014 from his home-in-exile in Sacramento, California. “The difficulty is that the time of maturity is very late. Which when you compare to a salmon, which is only two or three years, makes things complicated.” In the 1970s, Doroshov brought to the United States the secrets of sturgeon breeding and feeding that had been developed under the Soviets. Aquaculture, often called the “Blue Revolution,” was growing to embrace more and more species in the 1960s and ‘70s. For anyone who knew of the ancient fish’s slow maturity, high value, and potential vulnerability in the wild, it was obvious that sturgeon was an ideal candidate for domestication. This was true not only for Soviet-based sturgeon but sturgeon species throughout the northern hemisphere. Eventually, Doroshov was given a position at the University of California, Davis and advanced the early methodology to domesticate the white sturgeon (A. transmontanus), a species endemic to North America and whose range extends from Mexico to the Gulf of Alaska. In time, that same technology was applied to a few individuals of the several species of Caspian sturgeon that had been brought alive to the United States before the CITES ban. In the end, all of this bloomed into something that I called the American caviar renaissance in a 2014 Food and Wine article. Today, white sturgeon grow in tanks across California, Hawai‘i, Oregon, and Idaho. Meanwhile, in the southeastern United States—in Florida, Georgia, and North Carolina, in particular—more Russian sturgeon probably reside on farms than exist in the entirety of the Caspian wild.

And it wasn’t just in the United States that the taming of sturgeon came to be seen as a useful thing to do. Canada, France, and Italy have all become significant growers since the Soviet Union collapsed. And China, beginning in the early 2000s, attempted to elevate all of its export products by launching the world’s largest and most expensive sturgeon caviar initiative, eventually attracting top endorsers like celebrity chef Eric Ripert. A rising caviar lifts all boats, Chinese economists reasoned. Today, China accounts for more than half of global caviar output.

But sturgeon farming’s real effect was to cheapen caviar to the point where suddenly it became accessible to the masses; tasteable not just on the tip of a tiny mother-of-pearl spoon but as a condiment. The less premium Chinese product entering the market has had a major effect, lowering overall wholesale prices by 50 percent since 2012. “You’d never take caviar that’s $300 an ounce and put it on something,” the San Francisco Michelin-star chef Matthew Accarino of the restaurant SPQR told me at the time of my caviar renaissance research. “Farming allows people to enjoy caviar in a way that it’s an ingredient rather than an unobtainable luxury item.”

So all is smooth sailing right? Let China, the Michelin-rated chefs, and the Caviar Queen spread their farmed eggs where it pleases them.

Except.

In 2022, after a protracted 10-year battle with caviar producers, the US Fish and Wildlife Service drafted a motion that is set to declare 10 species of Russian and European sturgeon endangered (US sturgeon species had already earned the endangered designation back in the early 2010s). Should this happen, it would eliminate the ability of American growers “to possess, harvest, sell, or harass” the fish that are already on their own farms. If the law passes, growers would have 30 days to liquidate their stocks. While fish farmers in Europe, Canada, and China wouldn’t technically have to do the same, the US market would be closed to them, cutting them off from the largest caviar market in the world. Sturgeon farming could very soon be taken off the table entirely. One grower, Jeff Hinshaw at a sturgeon aquaculture facility in Georgia, told me that the potential threat of a return to smuggling of wild product is a very real prospect. “If you do anything to limit sturgeon farming, you’ve taken a large step backwards in terms of black market harvesting, which could be the death knell of some of these wild stocks.”

It’s unclear exactly how this draft statute bubbled up from the ether and threatened to take farmed caviar hostage. That illegal trading of sturgeon eggs persists is surely true. Between 2010 and 2015, customs officials seized almost 2,000 kilograms of caviar at the US border—mostly from Russia. A 2018 report by the nonprofit group TRAFFIC stated that black market wild caviar is still being sold under the table, and the myriad agents moving product all over the world can often result in farmed and wild getting jumbled along the way. But the issue is more nuanced. Republicans who’ve long wanted to defang the U.S.’s Endangered Species Act may be receptive to any change that weakens it. Democrats who may suspect a deeper anti-environmental agenda hidden behind what seems like a harmless tweak are digging in their heels. Over on the internet, a pair of twins called the Beckermans recently posted a long screed against the cruelties suffered by farmed sturgeon. “There’s five-feet long endangered sturgeons (fishes) suffering in tiny tanks for 10-plus years, enduring repeated stabbings in their abdomens (to check if their eggs are mature) and workers sucking their eggs out with straws—all for a luxury garnish. The inhumane way they torture and stab the fish is NOT chic and NOT okay.”

Regardless, it’s interesting to speculate what would happen if sturgeon aquaculture shut down and the only supply of caviar in the world became, once again, wild and endangered. If the Caviar Queen were to spread the progeny of an endangered wild beluga sturgeon on her Doritos, surely chaos would ensue. Like the ornithologist who infamously killed a mustached kingfisher for a museum collection and became the internet’s demon-of-the-year in 2015, the Queen would likely be dumped and pilloried faster than the world’s meme-ologists could say “I like turtles.”

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I am scrolling and clicking and typing and talking on the phone with a person whose job it is to influence influencers.

Sara Wilson is known for coining the term “digital campfires”—the little flames lighted by relative unknowns on TikTok and Instagram that occasionally set ablaze dozens of zettabytes across the internet. Originally a journalist, today she lives in Los Angeles, California, and works with a range of clients helping them hitch their brands to trends: trends that she tracks and reads in a way that I imagine Morpheus aboard the Nebuchadnezzar followed the movements of agents across the Matrix.

I want to understand why caviar has taken off in the 2020s, and why the Caviar Queen has been able to establish such a vast online kingdom.

Wilson thinks about this question for exactly five seconds. “I hadn’t heard about caviar being a thing when you first mentioned it,” she tells me, “but it checks a lot of boxes. It makes total sense.” In essence, she explains, it has something to do with the intersection of faux royalty, status, and FOMO (fear of missing out).

She begins by saying the “whole tinned fish thing” had had a moment during and immediately following the COVID-19 pandemic. So there was that. And also, she points out, “protein” is having a moment. And there was also the fact that you were eating actual eggs of something. A feeling that brought you closer to nature.

But what was probably really driving the trend toward caviar, she thinks, is an obsession with “old money aesthetics” that started to appear in the last few years; something often referred to on social media as quiet luxury.

Fueled by things like the hit television show Succession, the trend circles around an inchoate nostalgia for an imaginary past when more people had generational money—“the opposite of flashing your wealth,” she says. Through caviar, Wilson suggests, customers might feel they were “accessing that lifestyle.” Moreover, she points out, a food product, compared to most other luxury products, is a relatively inexpensive “social flex.” Compared to a $20,000 yachting tour of the Greek Islands or a $100,000 luxury automobile, a $100 tin of caviar is a steal.

 

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Scroll through feeds on Instagram and you can find caviar on almost anything, including fried chicken.

Or course, Wilson acknowledges, “the idea of having wealth for generations is ridiculous and completely out of reach” for most of the people buying caviar. “But that’s what makes it so compelling.”

Inherited, unimaginable wealth, strived for hopelessly by people who haven’t a clue or a means of how to get it.

Poshlost’, in other words.

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I am swimming a long, slow circle in waters less than one kilometer south of Industry Kitchen and the 24K caviar pizza, in a river where federally endangered wild Atlantic (A. oxyrinchus) and shortnose sturgeon (A. brevirostrum) still swim. I feel the shifts in temperature and current around me as I round the tip of Governors Island and head north toward Manhattan, shuddering at the thought of being struck by one of the dozens of container ships, pleasure craft, tugboats, and cruise vessels steaming their way into the busiest harbor on the East Coast of the United States. I feel positively anadromous as I sense the tide shift and bear me up the east side of Governors toward the mouth of the Hudson River and the upstream gravel beds where, were I actually a sturgeon, I would lay my immensely valuable eggs.

There are no sturgeon sought or sighted during my swim—it’s just a casually competitive three-kilometer swim—put on every year by a local nonprofit. But others have stroked in these waters and come across the fish. The long-distance open-water swimmer Christopher Swain, after completing a 214-kilometer traversing of Long Island Sound, passed under the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge and discovered a dead two-meter-long sturgeon shredded and floating nearby. “At first glance I mistook it for another piece of garbage floating out on the tide,” he tells me later. “I remember thinking, ‘Here was a fellow swimmer who didn’t make it.’”

 

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A dead sturgeon spotted in Long Island Sound, under the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge.

If there is a consequence of the Teflon-y, glossy surface of the Caviar Queen and her imitators scarfing down millions of sturgeon eggs a year, it is a blissful ignorance of the presence of the living, wild animal that made those eggs possible. “Until the last fraction of a second in geologic time,” author Richard Carey writes in The Philosopher Fish, “sturgeons were the dominant large fish in every major river system on all three continents of the temperate northern hemisphere, unassailable (except from artillery) and prolifically abundant.” Far more ancient than nearly every other fish we eat, they form a largely unchanged, ancient evolutionary bridge between animals like sharks and rays and the modern fish we know today. Like the auroch, we have tamed it into something resembling a water cow.

Upstream from here in the Hudson River, small, remnant populations of wild Atlantic and shortnose sturgeon hang on, but just barely. In a later journey up the river, I stop by a tributary called Moodna Creek, which drains Storm King Mountain, one of the sites that birthed the modern American environmental movement. Next to the creek is a sign with a blue and white picture of a sturgeon—a sign you find on rivers and streams all over the Hudson Valley. But a sturgeon sighting is a rarity.

I want to find sturgeon, or at least traces of their existence in the wild. I want to see where they lay their precious eggs and understand what stands in the way of their ability to complete their life cycle. So I find someone who knows: former NYPD cop-turned-ecology-PhD George Jackman, who tried to clear sturgeons’ natal creeks of the obstacles that prevent them from spawning, in the same way he tried to clear the streets of violence as a beat cop. As we walk the banks of rivers an hour north of Manhattan, waterways that should be prime sturgeon spawning grounds, he shows me half a dozen useless dams thrown up by industry of days past that could possibly impede the great fish’s return. And it’s not just dams. He talks about lawsuits too. The organization he once worked for, Riverkeeper, has just filed suits in New York, Delaware, and New Jersey to compel state agencies to intervene on behalf of the thousands of sturgeon that are allegedly caught as by-catch by various fisheries and dumped back in the water dead, often unreported. He talks about the ship strikes that kill a thousand more sturgeon a year up and down the East Coast. I nod in sympathy. But I also think of all the people on TikTok who know nothing of this great fish—who only know the eggs that are in ample supply. I wonder out loud what it would take to make the average American care about any of this.

“What would you say if I bombed the Louvre?” Jackman asks, tearing up. “These fish are masterpieces.”

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I am driving ever northward, out of New York City. I’m seeking the source of the Hudson River sturgeon, seeking to lay eyes on the creature that has become so distant from us even as its eggs have grown more visible around the world through social media.

Part of the tragedy of the poshlost’ of online caviar hawkers is the fact that while the farmed fish’s industrially managed spawn becomes ever more visible, the real, wild fish fades from sight and memory. So I journey north to Hyde Park, where the salt front of the Hudson River ends and the fresh water suitable for nurturing sturgeon eggs begins. I board an observation skiff and make my way toward a team of scientists in the middle of the river who’ve put out three set nets at the beginning of the incoming tide in hopes of catching, tagging, and releasing a wild Atlantic sturgeon.

At the first net, fisheries biologist Amanda Higgs directs a team to slowly draw in the net. I tense when I see one of the floats atop the net wiggle slightly. But it’s just the current jostling the buoys. The net comes up empty, and we move downstream to the next location.

I think of something screenwriting guru Robert McKee said in a seminar I once attended. “You can tell a society in decline,” boomed McKee, “when spectacle replaces story.”

What story could be more profound and Odyssey-like than that of the mighty sturgeon, a fish that against all odds fights out of a natal creek, evades seabirds and bigger fish, enters the great ocean of life, feeds and learns and grows and returns to its home, sometimes 500 kilograms heavier than when it left, only to sniff out the sweet water of its birth and begin the cycle again.

And what could be more spectacle-like than an endless TikTok loop of caviar plopped on ice cream and devoured with a soundtrack of “ooos” and “mmms”?

We reach the second sampling site. Again, the nets are drawn in. Again, Higgs cranes her head over the lip of the webbing to see if perchance one of the great fish has come to grace us with her presence. Nothing.

I think about the distance swimmer Christopher Swain and the way the mangled sturgeon haunted him after his own epic New York swim. “Perhaps because we see ourselves as separate,” Swain wrote me, “we don’t hold space for and take good care of the other creatures with whom we share our waterways. I wonder, how would the Hudson look and feel if our goal were to live in right relationship with the river?”

We come to the third and final site, and I’ve all but put my notebook away. This will be one of those fish stories that I sometimes write where the absence of the fish makes its own point. “Where the Hero Never Ascends,” to paraphrase a chapter title from The Philosopher Fish.

But no!

The net cords are tight! The floats atop are shaking violently, and all at once, there she is. Two meters long, 90 kilograms, wrestling with all the kinetic energy needed to fight a river to its source. As the scientists lift her into the holding tank and measure her, I think that this is the real old-money aesthetic. This is the real quiet luxury. These diamond shields of cartilage running along her side, sculpted by the artisan of time itself. The adornments on her endlessly fascinating body make the foie gras and Périgord truffle studs on the 24K pizza seem embarrassingly trite. Such are the labors of humans when held up against the full flex of nature’s power.

I don’t know what to do with this image of pure, awesome life. I quit Instagram and my iPhone years ago. I never joined TikTok. I feel a desire to share this moment with someone special. Someone who has the rizz and the following to somehow convince the hordes on social media that this matters. That this fish was. That this fish is.

In truth, what I really wish is that Danielle the Caviar Queen could see this.

Aquaculture is big business in Canada. In 2023, open-net-pen salmon farming in British Columbia alone produced 50,000 tonnes of fish worth just over US $350-million. But on June 30, 2029, the federal government’s long-looming ban on open-net-pen salmon farming is set to take effect. On that day, 63 operations will be forced to shut down.

For decades, BC’s open-net-pen salmon farmers have faced criticism that their activities are harming the environment by promoting the spread of disease and fostering parasitic sea lice that can infect wild salmon. But closing a salmon or other kind of marine farm isn’t as simple as letting a field lie fallow.

Whether degraded by poor maintenance, battered by heavy storms, or beset by financial woes, aquaculture operations have gone under before—sometimes literally. And when they do, derelict equipment can find its way to the seafloor or become suspended in the water column.

“It’s pretty devastating,” says Ben Boulton, the program manager of British Columbia’s Rugged Coast Research Society, a charity that works with the provincial government and First Nations to clean up marine debris specifically from shellfish farms. These efforts have often involved smaller mom-and-pop oyster operations that lost gear to the ocean floor years or decades ago.

“You come upon a mound of gear that is seemingly infinite—a huge mess everywhere you look,” he says. Abandoned nets, ropes, buoys, concrete blocks, plastic buckets and trays, PVC pipes, generators, steel anchors, iron rebar, floats, gangways, docks, drums, tires, and polystyrene foam can all linger, threatening the marine environment.

During one disturbing stint at a derelict operation on northern Vancouver Island, for instance, workers with the nonprofit Ocean Legacy Foundation found that a group of river otters had started building dens inside the polystyrene foam from decaying floats and were eating the marine life growing on it.

The federal government is more optimistic that open net-pen salmon farmers in 2029 won’t leave an environmental mess.

Multinational companies dominate salmon farming in British Columbia and are “quite professionalized and generally highly compliant” with regulations, says Brenda McCorquodale, the senior director of the Aquaculture Management Division at Fisheries and Oceans Canada (DFO) on the West Coast. “We’re not anticipating there’d be some sort of abandonment of infrastructure.”

Boulton’s experience with shellfish aquaculture, however, emphasizes the importance of vigilance. “There’s a need for oversight—a third party, for sure—on sites to supervise the decommissioning,” he says.

Nico Prins, the executive director of the British Columbia Shellfish Growers Association, says government oversight of marine debris issues at shellfish facilities has historically been lax. “I’ll be honest with you,” he says, “the level of enforcement probably hasn’t been what was required or what has been needed.”

“I know there are plenty of shellfish farms that are in a pretty bad state of repair,” Prins adds. “There’s a lack of … government regulators to achieve enforcement of the conditions.”

In recent years, the government has been trying to make a dent in the problem, working to clean up sites and prevent more farm owners across British Columbia from cutting their losses and walking away from nets, floats, and other equipment. But cleaning up ocean debris requires money—and lots of it.

British Columbia government regulations require licensed aquaculture operations, including salmon farms, to outline their future debris management plans and post a security deposit to cover cleanup. But the amount set aside, Prins says, can fall short of what’s required. In the past, some purchasers of farm sites have also inherited the costs of removing the accumulated mess. Otherwise, taxpayers can wind up paying the price.

In 2020, the province launched Clean Coast, Clean Waters, an initiative that has so far spent roughly $35-million to remove more than 2,100 tonnes of marine debris and 215 derelict vessels from the province’s coast. The program tackled the first two derelict aquaculture sites in 2024.

The Rugged Coast Research Society, says Boulton, specializes in cleaning up remote and hard-to-reach parts of the coast. The organization’s process of trash removal starts with using a remotely operated vehicle—equipped with a camera and grabber claw—to survey the site. Often, they’ll complement this visual search with side-scan sonar to identify hotspots of trash and map out targets. From there, four commercial divers work in limited visibility and at risk of entanglement to rig up gear for removal. Then, they’ll use a hydraulic crane to haul the material to the surface to be cleaned, sorted by type, and brought to shore. Typically, about half the haul is repurposed or recycled, with the rest going to landfill. Depending on the depth of the water, the weather, and the tides, divers may have only a few minutes to work.

“It’s a very challenging industry,” says Dylan Smith, the owner of BC-based Deep Search Diving.

Since 2020, Smith’s company has been contracted by governments or private operators to survey 92 shellfish farms, half of which he’s already cleaned up. Typically, the company’s services cost between $7,000 and $35,000—but they can climb as high as $70,000 if a lot of gear has drifted beyond the reach of divers.

The work is taxing but rewarding, says Boulton. “It takes months to get these projects going, then you end up in the field. It’s a lot of labor, very dirty. But seeing a barge fully loaded up with debris from a site—our crews feel a sense of relief and accomplishment.”

Tossing money at debris cleanup is one thing, but changing future behavior is another.

Over the past five years, DFO has launched several initiatives targeting marine debris, including a mandatory tagging program to more easily identify who owns aquaculture equipment that goes rogue, and containment measures to prevent foam flotation from breaking free.

One of the big game changers occurred in 2022 when federal regulations began forcing aquaculture operators to hire divers or use remotely operated vehicles to survey the seafloor for old gear within their operating areas and document its removal. The goal, says McCorquodale, is to make license holders “responsible for knowing what’s going on underneath their sites and keeping the area clean and free of debris.”

As the world increasingly turns its attention to the environmental woes caused by ghost nets, microplastics, and other forms of marine debris, increased scrutiny of the hidden costs of aquaculture on the ocean environment couldn’t come at a better time.

The North Sea is a hard place to love. It’s not the cold, or the silty gray-brown waters that seem to suck the brightness out of the sky that make it unappealing, it’s what people have done to it over the centuries, transforming the North Sea into an industrialized seascape.

Trade has made this sea—which washes against the United Kingdom to the west and mainland Europe to the east—one of the world’s busiest shipping lanes. Some 1,300 passenger ferries, cargo vessels, and tankers cross the English Channel at the sea’s narrowest point every week. Commercial trawlers harvesting cod, herring, haddock, and more have scoured the seabed, causing some fish populations to decline. The fossil fuel industry has sucked 45 billion barrels of oil and gas from the bedrock beneath the United Kingdom’s territorial waters alone over the past half-century, leaving the rusting remnants of abandoned oil rigs rearing from the sea’s turbulent surface. Above the waves, the North Sea hums with dozens of wind farms, with many more to come, each one comprising hundreds of towering turbines to generate electricity and replace dwindling reserves of fossil fuels. And all this human exploitation has polluted the sea with undesirable chemicals, trash, and noise.

Once upon a time—before industrialization—the sea was filled with life. But go back further still, and the land beneath the sea itself was a vibrant ecosystem for all manner of terrestrial beings.

Evidence of the earliest human use of the North Sea region lies deep beneath the water, suspended silt, and seafloor, in the submerged territory of Doggerland that once connected the United Kingdom and mainland Europe. Before Doggerland was lost beneath rising seas, its low hills and broad valleys, braided rivers and wide estuaries, marshy wetlands and long gravel beaches were home to bear, boar, red deer, and people.

Doggerland is not well known outside the field of archaeology. And historically, when archaeologists have discussed it, they considered it a land bridge connecting two more interesting places, used by people to travel between Europe and modern-day Britain around 12,000 years ago. But innovative archaeology is reframing Doggerland as a territory in which human communities lived and thrived for millennia—a place that was known, that was home to generations—until a warming climate and rising seas forced people to leave and it was forgotten. As climate change accelerates in the modern era, the story of Doggerland becomes a story of our future.

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Vincent Gaffney, a jovial and unpretentious 66-year-old landscape archaeologist with close-cropped white hair and thick dark-rimmed spectacles, has spent two decades conjuring this lost land from the murky depths. Unlike most archaeologists, Gaffney has conducted his explorations without ever setting foot on his study site, which lies roughly 20 to 30 meters below the sea’s surface. Instead, his pioneering work at the Submerged Landscapes Research Centre, which he founded at the University of Bradford in England, involves sifting through huge quantities of seismic survey data. The detailed 3D maps and simulations he derives from that data re-create the topography and ecological complexity of an area nearly the size of Washington State. His work disputes the dismissive assumption that Doggerland was simply an ancient thoroughfare by bringing into relief a place that was ideal for human habitation, with all the water, food, and other resources people would have needed to thrive. “Everyone called it a land bridge, something you come across or go back again,” he says. “But you don’t live on bridges.”

Gaffney was born to working-class parents in England’s northeast and, despite spending a lifetime in the rarefied world of academia, retains his gentle Geordie burr and a love of English ale. For half his career, he has been beguiled by Doggerland, the idea of a lost landscape, of an Atlantis beneath the North Sea. But Doggerland is not Atlantis; it is not even that unusual.

The world has many submerged ancient coastal shelves such as Doggerland: Beringia extends between North America and Russia; Sundaland underpins Southeast Asia; the Sahul Shelf juts out from Australia. “Coasts hold the key to the mobility of humans across the millennia,” Gaffney tells me over a pint and a pie at his favorite pub. Cumulatively, submerged coastal shelves take up about the same space as present-day North America and would have been fundamental territories for human occupation and migration. Yet they have been largely out of reach of archaeologists. “These are all massively important historical areas which you cannot understand unless you know what’s happening underneath the sea,” Gaffney says.

What makes Doggerland different from Earth’s many other submerged lands is that Gaffney has found a way to see it.

By mapping the prehistoric land beneath the seabed and pioneering techniques for finding artifacts, Gaffney is also opening up the world’s other submerged continental shelves to remote archaeological exploration. Researchers in the Baltic Sea, elsewhere in the northern hemisphere, and in Australia, for example, are adopting his approach. The hidden coastal shelves represent a world of human habitation lost as the ice sheets began their retreat 20,000 years ago, triggering a global sea level rise of more than 120 meters. The global flooding that followed the last ice age “was the last time that humans experienced climate change at the scale we’re talking about now,” Gaffney says.

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Long before Gaffney began using technology to construct renderings of Doggerland, the submerged landscape was releasing clues about its existence in shards and fragments. Victorian-era oyster dredgers and trawlers occasionally hauled up the bones of mammals such as wolves, bears, elk, reindeer, woolly mammoths, and woolly rhinoceroses, along with lumps of peat known as moorlog. The fishermen commonly tossed the bones into deeper waters to prevent them from tangling nets, but some of the bones made their way into private collections and small museums. And for the past half-century, beachcombers and hobbyists searching the coastal and intertidal zones have collected harpoon tips, flint shards, and mammal bones, as well as fragments of human skulls, femurs, and jaws—and even a spearhead made from human bone—some of which have been dated back to Doggerland.

In the early 1900s, geologist and paleobotanist Clement Reid became intrigued by another mystery emerging from the sea. Stumps of drowned trees sometimes appear at very low tides along parts of the English coast. Confounded 19th-century visitors surmised they were seeing proof of divine intervention and nicknamed the stumps Noah’s Woods. In his 1913 book Submerged Forests, Reid proposed that the trees, mammal bones, and peat—which contained preserved bogbean seeds, willow leaves, and birchbark—were all evidence of a “sunken land.” He envisioned fen and forest stretching far beyond the coastline deep into the North Sea. Reid theorized that the Dogger Bank—a submerged sandbank roughly in the middle of the North Sea and named after Dutch fishing boats known as doggers—“once formed the northern edge of a great alluvial plain, occupying what is now the southern half of the North Sea, and stretching across to Holland and Denmark.” Gaffney considers Reid’s book foundational in arguing for the importance of submerged lands in prehistory.

Vindication of Reid’s argument came in 1931, when a trawler skipper split a piece of moorlog that was clogging his net and discovered a delicate 22-centimeter-long spearhead. It was finely crafted from red deer antler, notched with sawtooth barbs, and carved with a series of parallel incisions. Archaeologists later determined this artifact—the first human tool from the North Sea studied—to be 13,000 years old. Sufficient numbers of similar barbed points have been found at numerous sites along the North Sea coast that they are considered a typical technology of the Mesolithic and Upper Paleolithic European time periods between 50,000 and 6,000 years ago. The spearheads were likely used by shoreline, estuary, and riverine people to hunt fish in the shallows. British academic Grahame Clark devised a theory of human migration based partly on that spearhead discovered in 1931; in it, he characterized the region that later became known as Doggerland as a land bridge (though the term would come later), and the reputation stuck.

Archaeology grew as a new discipline through the 20th century, yet there was so much to explore on land that looking beneath the sea hardly seemed a worthwhile pursuit. Doggerland, only just glimpsed, slipped from view. Artifacts continued to turn up, but these chance finds, collected and catalogued by museum curators, lacked the context for anyone to make sense of them.

The scientist who turned attention back to the North Sea was Bryony Coles, a professor emeritus of prehistoric archaeology at the United Kingdom’s University of Exeter, who published a seminal, if esoteric, paper titled “Doggerland: a Speculative Survey” in 1998. In the paper, Coles reinterpreted existing discoveries and literature. The general consensus among archaeologists at that point was that Doggerland was too difficult to study because it was underwater and unimportant because it was a thoroughfare. Coles reframed it as a place of significance. The artifacts were, she wrote, reminders that “the area of the present North Sea has been land in the past, and land that people knew.” Her paper gave Doggerland its name and its first tentative, theoretical maps consistent with what Reid had proposed. “Instead of focusing on land as bridge, we focus on land as a place to be,” she wrote. Doing so meant reinstating an erased people in both time and place, and restoring a lost history. Coles reframed Doggerland as a vast, populated plain that was the heartland of northwest Europe.

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Coles changed the way archaeologists thought about Doggerland, but what kind of “a place to be” was it? That question would set Gaffney off on a decades-long quest for answers.

As Coles drafted her paper on Doggerland’s watery past, Gaffney’s feet were firmly on dry ground. In the 1990s, he was experimenting with using GIS to conduct a kind of noninvasive archaeology that explored larger areas than could practically be excavated by hand. One of his early projects showed the hidden extent of a Roman city in Shropshire, in the west of England. He used similar techniques to map the landscape surrounding Stonehenge, the 5,000-year-old stone circle that is perhaps the most famous archaeological site in Britain.

At England’s University of Birmingham in 2001, Gaffney was teaching a postgraduate seminar on places that lie beyond the reach of archaeologists—“landscapes we could do nothing with,” as he puts it—when the North Sea came up in discussion with a graduate student named Simon Fitch who had previously studied geology. They wondered whether 3D seismic data collected for fossil fuel exploration could be used to create a detailed topographical map of the unseen landscape beneath the waves, but the question seemed moot. “The problem was, which oil and gas company would talk to us?” says Gaffney.

Seismic surveys of the ocean are carried out by boats: they emit soundwaves toward the seabed, and hydrophones record the seismic waves that reflect off and travel through the different materials beneath the surface. The surveys cost tens of millions of dollars per project and result in an X-ray image—a 3D picture of rock types, stratigraphy, and sediments that help identify potential crude deposits. The use of the technique is a worthwhile investment for multinational oil companies but is far beyond the budget of ordinary archaeology departments.

Gaffney and Fitch needed an introduction. They convinced a colleague who had experience working in basin geomorphology for the oil industry to help; together, they visited Petroleum Geo-Services (PGS), which acquires seismic data and compiles it into what it calls “MegaSurveys.” The company agreed, free of charge, to provide some data with which Gaffney and Fitch could attempt to create a prototype map, with the caveat that it would be “not very much, only 6,000 square kilometers.” Gaffney was stunned: his survey of Stonehenge, the largest archaeological geophysical survey in Britain at the time, had covered less than 15 square kilometers.

Gaffney used a bank of powerful computers to process the data, projecting the images onto a home cinema-sized stereoscopic screen, which he viewed through a pair of retro-futuristic wraparound 3D glasses. It took months, but gradually the land emerged on the screen, creating a portal to a lost world. The seismic data “took us deep into the Paleolithic,” he says. The images revealed the contours and outlines of ancient valleys beneath 12,000-year-old rivers. It was proof of concept that seismic data can be used to expose submerged lands. PGS donated another 19,000 square kilometers of data. The thin 30- to 40-meter top layer interested Gaffney most because it corresponds to the period when the glaciers were melting. European ice sheets had retreated northward over thousands of years as temperatures rose. Glaciers gave way to barren, windswept tundra and permafrost. Then, rivers and streams, lakes, estuaries, salt marshes, hills, and valleys began to appear, transforming the land into an ecosystem where people would have been able to survive in Doggerland for the first time as the warmer geological epoch of the Holocene began 11,700 years ago.

Armed with his new 3D visualizations, Gaffney plunged headlong into Doggerland, eager to seize the opportunity to discover this long-forgotten landscape. His ultimate goal is to determine where and how the people of Doggerland lived. Over the years, he has amassed astonishing quantities of seismic data, using it to expand and add detail and texture to his maps. With the maps, he has been able to identify where plants and animals likely lived, edging him ever closer to finding direct evidence of human habitation, such as settlements, houses, pits made for ritual or domestic purposes, or dense collections of animal bones or flint tools. He has rented research vessels to conduct high-resolution 2D seismic surveys that measure in centimeters instead of meters to add even more detailed information to the maps; deployed submarine cameras and mechanical dredges to bring up samples of seabed deposits; and extracted nearly 100 sediment cores, which have provided a wealth of information. Each core is collected by driving a 10-centimeter-diameter tube deep into the seabed. The extracted cylinder of peat, sand, chalk, and other material can then be radiocarbon dated, slice by slice, and read as a timeline of dynamically shifting habitats. The cores also contain ancient environmental DNA that can be analyzed to show what lived on the land.

The work has involved occasional seasickness. And endless funding bids. Gaffney has managed to carry out such an extensive investigation of Doggerland, running a series of collaborative projects for the past 20 years, because a wide range of sources have supported the work. The UK government, the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and the European Union are among his funders. His most recent grant is the biggest yet: a European Research Council-funded project called SUBNORDICA for investigating the entire southern North Sea and parts of the Baltic Sea, worth €13-million (US $13.7-million). “In archaeological terms, it’s like we’ve robbed a bank,” says Gaffney.

He focuses on estuaries and rivers, such as the submerged Southern River, 30 kilometers off the eastern coast of England. It was a waterway that sprang from peat soil, cut through a chalk outcrop, and drained into a large estuary—precisely the kind of place where people would have congregated and where sediments accumulate. Robin Allaby, an evolutionary geneticist at Warwick University in the United Kingdom, has taken hundreds of teaspoon-sized samples from Gaffney’s sediment cores and sequenced the DNA in each one. “The bottom of the sea is basically a constant four degrees [Celsius]—more or less a fridge—which is ideal [for preserving organic matter],” he says.

Allaby’s samples contain 574 taxa of plants and reveal rapid colonization by plants, with a leap in biodiversity just before the start of the Holocene. The Southern River, for example, was characterized by marshland and seagrass at the estuary, rising into grassland and deciduous woods that were predominantly willow with alder, elm, hazel, wingnut, and oak. By the Holocene, Doggerland was “basically a northern temperate forest biome,” Allaby says, “a very inhabitable landscape,” full of resources and opportunities for humans.

Doggerland’s low-lying mosaic of fish-rich waters, wetlands, hills, and animal-filled woods was an ideal environment for foragers who thrived where food sources were diverse. So far, little is known of the lifestyles of Doggerland’s inhabitants, but there is plenty of evidence from today’s coastal Mesolithic sites in the United Kingdom and Europe, areas that were the outer reaches of Doggerland before its inundation between 20,000 and 7,500 years ago. Here, people lived in small bands or larger communities; made tools from stone; felled wood for fuel and construction of simple houses; foraged plants, nuts, and seeds; caught fish in rivers and the shallow sea; and hunted animals, butchered them for food, and used their skins for clothing and their bones and antlers for fishing harpoons, weapons, and ritual objects. When faced with scarcity, mobility is the fundamental survival strategy for foraging people, but when resources are plentiful, they stay put. Archaeologists have found Mesolithic settlements, as well as burial sites, all around the North Sea’s present-day coastline, which suggests the only reason they have not found them in Doggerland is because those sites are beneath the sea. Gaffney aims to fill this archaeological lacuna.

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Doggerland was a land of plenty, but it was dynamic too, and this would eventually prove catastrophic. Within 14,000 years of emerging from the ice, Doggerland was submerged. Its gradual inundation is documented in the marine sediment and in the DNA, which shows that salt marshes crept ever farther up the freshwater Southern River over time.

At the University of Bradford, Gaffney’s colleague Phil Murgatroyd feeds all of this astonishing detail into a computer simulation that allows users to navigate a changing landscape over time, observing the interactions of plants, animals, and people. The data, says Gaffney, is “the backdrop, but the real output is visualization.” Murgatroyd’s model is the gamification of science: complex data that looks like Minecraft’s blocky 3D world and is navigated using an Xbox controller.

“These landscapes were named and loved”—just like the places people live in and know today—says Gaffney, “and climate change destroyed that. We should be aware of that, and we should have a better relationship with these landscapes. Phil’s work is the start of humanizing that landscape.”

Gaffney’s team at the University of Bradford is also analyzing a new set of sediment cores and other material collected in 2024, hoping to find traces of human presence, activity, or even settlement. Inspired by the search for extraterrestrial life on planets where conditions are not too hot and not too cold but just right, Gaffney has used his maps and the analysis of sedimentary DNA to zoom in on specific areas where people most likely had the right conditions to thrive, targeting them for remote exploration. “To find something, we need to have a place where it exists, where it is preserved, and where it is accessible. That’s the Goldilocks Zone for doing archaeology in the North Sea,” he says. “Accessible” is the tricky variable when it comes to submerged landscapes beyond the intertidal zone.

Yet Gaffney and his colleagues are optimistic because they have succeeded before, says Simon Fitch, sliding a little takeout box across the table toward me. Nestled inside is a small fragment of a handworked flint dredged from the Southern River in 2019. The team had lowered a mechanical grapple 30 meters to the seafloor and dug to a depth of about 10 centimeters to find it. Dark and shiny on one side where it was buried, rusty red on the exposed side, the flint is smooth and light with beveled edges and fits neatly in the palm of my hand. “It’s the edge of a hammerstone,” Fitch says with a grin, “the first directly prospected find from the North Sea.” Fitch explains that hammerstones were used in the manufacture of other simple stone tools, such as sharp flakes for cutting, and that this one was found close to a chalk cliff, which “suggests guys were going there to tool up.” The site may have been a kind of stone tool factory.

Until now, archaeologists have only ever found artifacts from far out at sea by chance—caught in a net or washed up on a beach—so the hammerstone is a breakthrough for archaeology and for Doggerland because it put people on the map and gave archaeologists reason to keep looking. “We had a landscape, we had dynamism, we had vegetation, but the thing that had been lost was the people,” says Gaffney. The flint changed that.

In 2019, Gaffney and his team prospected their first artifact from the North Sea—the hammerstone modeled here. Visualization by Submerged Landscapes Research Centre, University of Bradford

The approach of identifying a promising site and then hauling up material from a particular place is not the only technique being developed at the University of Bradford. In another room in the archaeology department, Gaffney’s colleagues sit at computers: Murgatroyd is working on his simulation; Ben Urmston explores the use of marine magnetometry to identify where people created structures such as fire pits or post holes; and Andrew Fraser is training AI and running machine learning programs to sift through the immense and ever-expanding data sets.

The work of Gaffney and his colleagues has been pioneering, says Luc Amkreutz at the Dutch National Museum of Antiquities who, in 2021, curated an exhibition of Doggerland’s many found artifacts and edited the book that followed. “It is tremendously important as it creates an awareness of the existence of a past landscape by resurfacing it, texturizing it, materializing it with rivers, lakes, hills, marshes, and coastline,” he tells me. “It creates a canvas for a populated world, the traces of which we document on our beaches and in our fishing nets.” To see Doggerland as a land bridge is to look at it from a narrow, contemporary perspective, constrained by present-day coastlines and modern settlement patterns. But to understand Doggerland as a lived and lost landscape is to consider it on its own terms.

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One summer afternoon, I wade into the North Sea off the Norfolk coast and swim out a little way toward Doggerland. Out of my depth in the bracing sea, I imagine the seabed dry and planted firmly beneath my feet, the shore a low escarpment marking the farthest reaches of a familiar landscape. As Doggerland disappeared, the people living there would have slowly departed as their home became uninhabitable, venturing into a new, lesser-known land.

Unlike people today, early Holocene people lived within the limits of nature and the lands they inhabited: when resources were scarce, they adapted; when a changing climate caused sea levels to rise, they migrated to new lands. Faced with anthropogenic climate change, migration is, once again, a solution for those whose lives become unlivable, but in a crowded and unequal world, it is hard, contested, and political.

“The story of how Doggerland turned into the North Sea teaches us that we are vulnerable and that we are not above, but are dependent on, nature,” says Emilie Reuchlin, a Dutch marine biologist, political scientist, and cofounder of the Doggerland Foundation conservation organization. “It shows us how destructive climate change can be. Doggerland teaches us humility.”

As Doggerland was diminished by rising seas, the landmass shrank to become an archipelago, then a single island, before the last hilltop became the shallow Dogger Bank. By 6,000 years ago, this once varied, resource-rich land had flooded entirely, and the last of its human inhabitants had moved to higher land to the east and west.

Doggerland is a reminder that the world is not static, that the landscape we know today is different from what it was in the past and will not remain the same in the future. Doggerland’s disappearance is also a reminder of humanity’s reliance on and subordination to nature; its message is to adapt to, nurture, and protect the environments we depend upon.

With the landscape in this state of constant evolution, Gaffney worries about the past slipping out of view. An irony of his work is that Doggerland was revealed thanks to seismic data from the fossil fuel extraction that is driving the climate change that threatens us all. But the renewable wind energy crucial to reaching net-zero targets also threatens to put Doggerland out of reach forever, beneath a tangle of undersea cables, anchors, pilings, and safety exclusion zones that could make sampling and dredging impossible. Thousands of wind turbines are already operational, with many thousands more to come as Europe looks to the wind-whipped North Sea to generate more and more of its electricity.

Gaffney sees opportunity as well as threat in the wind energy infrastructure, however. Like the oil fields, wind farm developments produce tremendous quantities of new data about the geology of the shallow seabed as part of their site surveys. That information could deepen the understanding of Doggerland. Gaffney’s ambition is to persuade wind farm developers and national governments of Doggerland’s importance as a site of natural and cultural heritage, and to convince them of the need to share the data and allow archaeology to be carried out before new wind farms are built and access to the seabed is curtailed. “This is a time-limited opportunity to understand some of the last great unexplored [formerly] habitable landscapes on Earth, and we’re only just cracking the code,” says Gaffney.

Scientists expect global warming will cause sea levels to rise by up to one meter by 2100, and then will keep rising as temperatures continue to increase and ice sheets continue to melt. Coastal areas are highly populated today, as they were thousands of years ago.

The questions raised by the study of Doggerland, about how to adapt and survive when the climate changes, are being asked again in the 21st century. How many people called Doggerland home and how many were forced to migrate when their adaptive skills could no longer keep up with the pace of environmental change is not yet known, but today there are an estimated 190 million people living on land that will likely be underwater by the end of this century. How will we adapt? Where will we go?

Though reminiscent of a discarded clump of salad greens, this is actually a lettuce sea slug. I spotted it 20 meters below the surface on a coral reef off Playa Kalki, an idyllic beach on the northwestern edge of Curaçao. Bright video lights and a macrophotography camera in an underwater housing let me capture this invertebrate in all its colorful glory.

Named for the undulating waves of its broad, fleshy appendages—called parapodia—lettuce sea slugs appear in a range of colors from pale yellow to deep blue or even lettuce green. This variation is attributed to how the slugs process their food; they are transiently photosynthetic. (Photosynthesis: not just for plants and algae.)

When a lettuce sea slug eats algae, it steals the plastids, the parts responsible for making and storing food in cells, and moves them out to its parapodia. Once there, the plastids continue to harvest sunlight to make sugar, but now for the slug’s benefit. This arrangement is only temporary; the plastids slowly break down, so the lettuce sea slug has to keep eating algae to replace them.

On a brisk August morning in Tasermiut Fjord, southern Greenland, I poke my head from the hatch of my family’s 13-meter sailboat to find frost on the deck and a cloudless sky. It’s weather that demands exploring. After my husband and I haul our eight- and 10-year-old sons from bed and row the dinghy to the beach, we begin our trek up Klosterdalen, also known as Monastery Valley, where lichen-covered stone ruins of Viking-era structures rest among a jumble of talus.

Sacrificing dry feet to a tapestry of muddy sloughs and clear pools, we watch Arctic char flash their gunmetal backs while water beetles skim the surfaces. As we hike, I mark our route by the birds we see: rock ptarmigan sitting sentry on the tundra; snow buntings flashing distinctive white wing patches; flocks of redpolls thick with downy-headed juveniles. It’s the season of abundance in the North, the pregnant pause before autumn edges toward winter.

After lunch, my older son points out two mallard ducklings pressed against the shore, all but disappearing into the overhanging mud bank. A moment later, another bird swoops overhead, its shadow passing so close I can almost touch it with my outstretched hiking pole.

“Look!” my younger son whisper-shouts. “It’s a peregrine!” For a split second, beating wings blot out the sun.

And there it is: a Greenlandic peregrine falcon, a bird I’d sailed thousands of ocean kilometers to find. Against the crisp sky and crimson-tinged heather, lit by the low-angle afternoon light, the falcon’s sleek silhouette glows.

Unlike many of my other ventures as a field biologist searching for birds in far-flung locations, this isn’t a scientific assignment. Over the previous year, I’ve been sailing with my family from the Mediterranean to the Arctic, slowly connecting the dots between Greece and Greenland. Somewhere along the way, sparked by a passing comment from a colleague, I’d learned about a population of peregrines that call Greenland home. My initial curiosity soon evolved into a minor obsession, revealing as it did a tale of recovery, resilience, and change that transcends this small polar population.

Peregrine falcons hold near-mythical appeal in our collective imagination, and for good reason. Topping out at speeds of more than 320 kilometers an hour, they’re the fastest species on Earth, plummeting from the sky like amber-eyed missiles. They hit their prey at such staggeringly high velocities that they’ve prompted studies on the physics of momentum and the aerodynamics of flight. Their nest sites, or aeries—selected for their inaccessibility to predators and view of the world below—often require biologists to include technical climbing gear as part of their standard kit. As falconry subjects, they’ve inspired a vernacular of terms that roll off the tongue like a chant—tiercel, eyas, bewit, creance, stoop, keen, haggard, passager, bate. And with sharply masked faces, delicately barred undersides, and wings shaped like boomerangs, they’re also a visual delight.

As for the peregrine now cruising hip-high over the tundra in front of us, I couldn’t have Photoshopped a more stunning backdrop. August has ushered in the first hues of fall, with birch leaves yellowing and blueberries ripening on their stems. Ahead, hanging glaciers mark the terminal forks of the river; behind, the fjord is studded with icebergs. Towering above the red-gold valley is one of the world’s most formidable granite faces, casting a shadow that darkens the sea. For elite big-wall climbers, the peak is a coveted destination. For a falcon, it’s a hell of a place to call home.

Mesmerized, we watch the bird hunt: one moment as weightless as a feather in the breeze, the next slamming toward the ground in pursuit. For several minutes she continues this dance of floating and falling, hovering and stooping, giving form to the air like a master carver to wood. Then, presumably with a meal clenched in her talons, she turns abruptly toward her home cliff and disappears.

In the afterglow of our sighting, surrounded by the pulse of life that marks a late Arctic summer, it’s easy to envision the grandeur of this valley in perpetuity, and equally easy to ignore the signs of change, both visible and not. As a biologist, I’m keenly aware that we’re living in an age of extinction, but here, now, I couldn’t conjure a sense of absence if I tried. In fact, I’m hard-pressed to feel anything but awe. Like the researchers I’ll soon meet—a binocular-clad cult of falcon fanatics who chase their subjects to the far ends of the globe—I’ve inadvertently become a peregrine fangirl.

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Perhaps more cosmopolitan than any other wild bird species, peregrine falcons live on every continent except Antarctica, in habitats ranging from polar deserts to subtropical rainforests. They’re flexible in what they eat—from songbirds to seabirds, carrion to chickens—and in where they nest—on cliffs, in trees, on the ground, or on buildings. Some individuals barely budge throughout their lifetimes, whereas others, like the Greenlandic variety, embody the roots of their scientific name—Falco peregrinus, or “wandering falcon”—making migrations upwards of 25,000 kilometers per year.

Today, peregrine falcons are a familiar sight in many North American cities, earning them the reputation of being pigeon-eating, skyscraper-roosting urban dwellers. Some people see them as nuisance birds, with their raucous calls and fierce hunting habits, leaving streaks of white guano decorating city buildings and piles of bloodied feathers in backyard chicken coops. However, not so long ago, we flirted with the very real possibility of never seeing them again.

Over their long history, peregrines have been persecuted and revered with equal enthusiasm. The fossil record tracks the species to the mid-Pleistocene, while accounts of peregrines in human culture date back at least several thousand years. Before assuming their prominent role in modern falconry, they were mummified and placed in Egyptian tombs and proffered as gifts among royalty in ancient China. They feature in the art and legends of many Indigenous cultures and were sometimes depicted as winged messengers between earth and sky. They’ve also roosted solidly in our literary canon, from Greek mythology to Shakespeare to contemporary bestsellers. A peregrine graces the cover of the 1950s classic My Side of the Mountain, which I read aloud to my children on our passage to Greenland.

Popularity of a wild species doesn’t guarantee its longevity, however—a lesson that humans have learned many times over and still seem unable to fully grasp. Like other aerial predators, peregrines were deemed pests throughout much of the Western world in the 19th and 20th centuries and were routinely plucked from the sky by bird hunters, pigeon fanciers, and gamekeepers. During the Second World War, the falcons met an unlikely foe in the British Royal Navy, which killed them across Europe in order to protect homing pigeons delivering messages between military personnel. Yet the biggest insult of all came as industrial farming took hold around the world, introducing DDT, dieldrin, and other organochlorine pesticides.

Since birds like peregrines feed high on the food chain, contaminants accumulate in their bodies and cause severe eggshell thinning, among other health impacts. When peregrines sat on their eggs, they promptly broke them, effectively halting their reproduction and making the species an unfortunate poster child highlighting the hazards of DDT to living creatures. Rachel Carson’s influential Silent Spring unveiled the environmental crisis that postwar scientists had created: by attempting to better agriculture through the production of pesticides, they had inadvertently poisoned the world.

By the early 1970s, humans had decimated peregrine populations across much of their native range. In North America, they were extirpated east of the Rocky Mountains and south of the boreal forest; across northern Europe, only a few stragglers remained. The future for the critically endangered species looked bleak.

Amid the desperate handwringing that accompanied the regret of doing too little, too late, biologists identified a glimmer of hope on the northern horizon. Despite the absence of nesting peregrines, there were still regular sightings of the birds in the northeastern United States during fall migration; somewhere, somehow, these falcons seemed to be hanging on. The rallying cry was sounded: find out where the migrating peregrines had come from and whether they, too, were imperiled.

Researchers had a strong hunch and a smattering of historical reports to guide their search. Over the preceding decades, peregrines had been documented by Greenlanders and occasionally captured by enterprising foreign falconers who’d traveled by sailboat, cargo ship, or military plane to Greenland. Though a harsh and distant land in the minds of many policymakers, the island now offered a probable source of these fleet-winged ghosts.

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Like the peregrines themselves, Greenland is full of contradictions. The world’s largest island (excluding those deemed continents) is neither green nor especially land-like to most eyes, at least from a distance. According to the Icelandic sagas, Erik the Red—an exiled, Norwegian-born Viking—used this moniker as a 10th-century propaganda device to entice others to join him in a place largely covered in ice. Evidently, it worked. Norse settlers from Iceland arrived with horses, sheep, and pigs. They stayed for about 500 years, settling on the southern fringes of the Greenland ice sheet, which currently covers nearly 80 percent of the country and 1.2 percent of the planet’s terra firma, an area roughly three times the size of Texas.

Known also as Kalaallit Nunaat, or “Land of the People,” Greenland has also been home to Indigenous residents for more than 4,000 years, with multiple waves of migration from Arctic North America, followed by periods of apparent and largely unexplained human absence. The ancestors of contemporary Greenlandic Inuit, or Kalaallit—who today comprise most of the country’s population—likely arrived around the same time as the Norse and well before Denmark claimed Greenland as a colonial territory in the mid-18th century. Topographic maps and nautical charts reflect this complicated human history, with Norwegian, Danish, English, and Inuit place names layered atop 44,000 kilometers of fjord-cut coastline.

Today, Greenland operates mostly autonomously under Greenlandic Home Rule but retains strong ties to Denmark—including through its surprisingly rich, albeit largely colonial, history of bird research. Many early Danish missionaries to Greenland were avid birders who left detailed avifaunal records, augmenting those from visiting expedition leaders, civil servants, and physicians. The earliest Arctic bird-banding program originated in Greenland in 1926 and was later expanded to recruit local participants via an unusual fee-per-bird payment system. In 1954, for instance, the capture and banding of a peregrine falcon—kiinalleraq in the Greenlandic language Kalaallisut and vandrefalk in Danish—was valued at 4.8 Danish kroner, equivalent at the time to US $0.67.

The first formal study of peregrine falcons in Greenland began in 1972 in Kangerlussuaq (formerly Søndre Strømfjord), a west coast fjord where the ice sheet pulls away from the coast, leaving an abundance of nesting habitat. Americans William Mattox and William Burnham, both known familiarly as Bill, arrived to find a stable population of peregrines and the source of the mysterious fall migrants. Although peregrines breeding in Greenland were exposed to pesticides during migration and while overwintering at lower latitudes, they had extended periods to “detox,” which potentially explained why their exposure remained below the threshold that caused widespread reproductive failure elsewhere.

This chapter in ornithological history offered new promise for peregrines by suggesting that their numbers in the northern hemisphere were perhaps not as bleak as once projected. It also led to some of the longest-running studies of the species within its range, revealing new information about the birds’ nesting behavior, diet, and impressive migrations. Collectively, the two Bills, who were both eloquent and apparently unafraid of being deemed loquacious, wrote tomes about their findings.

Over the following several decades, dozens of graduate theses and research papers originated from western Greenland, shaping our understanding of peregrine falcons in the Arctic and elsewhere. Birds that nest in northern Greenland, for instance, make the longest migrations in the species’ range, with some individuals traveling to and from South America each year. Covering up to 900 kilometers a day, they’re not only impressive endurance athletes but also wildly individualistic in their habits, with routes that arc like spaghetti across the globe. Though peregrines often specialize in songbird prey, in Greenland they adjust their meal plans to match what’s on the table—readily swapping snow buntings for seabirds, redpolls for young hares. Where they’ve ventured farther north in Greenland, they join gyrfalcons in chomping on chunky little auks—small relatives of puffins that number in the tens of millions and provide a seemingly limitless source of food to hungry Arctic falcons.

Though research in Greenland didn’t explicitly save peregrines from what once seemed an inevitable fate, it helped explain why they still had a fighting chance: peregrines will make a living any way and in any place they can. Their adaptability proved to be their superpower. This flexibility impressed even those who thought they knew peregrines best, and, in turn, sent a bevy of field biologists spinning toward their own private obsessions: with Greenland, with falcons, with abseiling down cliffs and braving summer snowstorms. Studying peregrines in Greenland requires an unconventional skill set—picking mosquitoes out of one’s oatmeal, dodging icebergs by small boat, guarding against talon strikes, and scaling rock walls as “a necessary means of transportation”—that attracts adrenaline junkies and hardcore naturalists alike.

Since the Bills’ first survey in Kangerlussuaq, their commitment to conserving the species also extended well beyond the brief field seasons. Mattox spent many years advocating for peregrine recovery in both private and political spheres. And when Burnham wasn’t chasing peregrines in Greenland, he led captive rearing efforts in Colorado as part of the North American reintroduction program. The Peregrine Fund, founded by Tom Cade and later directed by Burnham, released the first captive-reared peregrines to the wild in Colorado and the East Coast in the mid-1970s. Over the next three decades, about 7,000 birds were reintroduced to North America, providing a critical boost to local populations. Many of the birds used in these captive breeding efforts were donated by falconers, with some likely originating from Greenlandic stocks.

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I’d hoped to see fieldwork on Greenland’s peregrine falcons in person, but the Denmark Strait had other plans for my family. We’d been poised to leave Iceland for weeks, reading daily ice charts and forecasts that declared repeatedly and unequivocally: not today. The rules for high-latitude sailing and Arctic fieldwork are similar: weather is king, and schedules are made to be changed. For us, getting to Greenland before the season’s end meant sailing north, rather than south, from Iceland and touching down in Scoresbysund, more than 1,500 kilometers from our original destination.

By the time we reach southern Greenland, I’m too late to meet Knud Falk and Søren Møller, a team of Danish biologists who began chasing Greenlandic peregrines about a decade after the Bills. Their commitment to falcons and the environmental lessons they can teach us has spanned 40 years; the research program they initiated in 1981 continues to this day.

“We tried to quit many times, but it never worked,” Møller jokes when I reached him later on a video call.

Though, in Falk’s words, they’d arrived “late to the party”—meaning the hazards of DDT were already well established—the pair’s contributions proved both timely and lasting. By collecting addled eggs and measuring eggshell thickness over time, they established an effective and tractable proxy for levels of DDT and its metabolites in Greenlandic peregrines. They later collaborated on studies of other emerging chemical contaminants, such as flame retardants and per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (more commonly known as PFAS), some of which have been transported remarkable distances—by air, water, or the even birds themselves—to appear in Greenland-nesting peregrines.

As Falk explains, “We’re not just studying [the peregrine] because it is a fantastic species, and ecologically a top predator, but because it helps us protect the environment for our kids. This sort of legacy is important.”

In the end, the recovery of peregrine falcons has proven to be one of the good-news conservation stories in recent history: we recognized a problem and we did something about it. DDT was banned from agricultural use in most of North America and Europe by the early 1970s, allowing peregrines and other species to rebound with help from captive rearing. In 1999, peregrines were removed from the US endangered species list.

More recently, Falk and Møller’s data contributed to the listing of BDE-209—a carcinogenic flame retardant—under the Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants, once again making Greenland’s falcons key sentinels for the impacts of chemical compounds on our ecosystems. And in Sweden, where Falk now lives, the peregrine has become such a recognizable icon of environmental stewardship that it is used as a symbol for the Swedish Society for Nature Conservation and as a label on foods that have been sourced sustainably.

Yet just because a species has survived one gauntlet doesn’t mean its future is secure.

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After the initial frost-laced morning when we spot our first Greenlandic peregrine, my family spends a week anchored in Tasermiut Fjord. It is, as the harbormaster from the nearby town of Nanortalik describes, one of the most beautiful places on Earth. It’s also thick with peregrines. In three of the four valleys we explore by foot, we find territorial birds. After the young fledge, peregrine families remain near the aeries for several weeks, chasing away perceived threats such as ravens, eagles, and humans. Though we aren’t close enough to elicit their signature dive bombing—or, in turn, to require helmets—my sons quickly learn to recognize the peregrines’ defense calls, and to train their binoculars on the cliff walls in hopes of catching a glimpse. We record each nest sighting to add to Falk and Møller’s database.

Mine aren’t the first, or, by any stretch, the most dedicated ornithologist’s children to help collect local peregrine data. When I speak to Burnham’s son, Kurt, by phone in late August, he recalls a childhood shaped by falcons. He describes a photograph of himself in a crib at 10 days old, with a fuzzy-headed peregrine chick by his side; while Kurt’s mother was in labor, this sharp-beaked surrogate sibling was pipping from its egg. One of Kurt’s chores around the time he was elementary school was to help imprint young peregrines that would later be used for captive breeding. “Once the falcon chicks were big enough to walk, I’d tow them around in the back of my Tonka trucks,” he explains.

As savvy with peregrines as most contemporary teenagers are with TikTok, 16-year-old Kurt was an eager and well-qualified field assistant. Following in his father’s footsteps, he began his career in Greenland in 1991. Soon after, the Burnhams moved their primary study area to northwestern Greenland, centered on a site known today as Pituffik Space Base (formerly Thule Air Base). The father-son team worked together until Bill’s untimely death in 2006 from brain cancer, at which time Kurt took over—and expanded upon—the decades-long family legacy. (The other Bill, Bill Mattox, continued peregrine research at Kangerlussuaq until 1997 and chased falcons elsewhere until his death in 2020.)

More recently, the Burnhams ushered yet another cohort into Greenlandic fieldwork. In 2019, Kurt and his wife Jennifer, a geographer who also conducts research in Greenland, brought their eight- and 10-year-old sons—the same ages as mine are now—to Pituffik. Counting Kurt’s grandfather, who’d accompanied Bill as a field assistant many years earlier, that season marked the fourth generation of Burnhams to follow falcons in Greenland.

Just as caring for a species is intergenerational work, so too can it take many generations to right an environmental wrong. We refer today to DDT and related compounds as “legacy contaminants” for their longevity; five decades after they were largely banned from use in the northern hemisphere, they persist in many ecosystems. Although eggshell thickness has steadily improved in Greenlandic peregrines, Falk and Møller project that it won’t return to “normal”—pre-DDT—levels until 2034.

Meanwhile, peregrine populations in North America are trending downward for the first time since the 1970s. Scientists aren’t sure of the culprit, but the drop could be caused by avian influenza, a decline in prey species, or contamination by neonicotinoid pesticides or flame retardants. Environmental contaminants also loom on the Arctic horizon, including mercury, flame retardants, and PFAS, some of which Falk, Møller, and Burnham have documented in nesting falcons. Mercury concentrations in Greenlandic peregrines, for instance, rival those measured anywhere else in their range. And as in other parts of the Arctic, climate change is the undeniable woolly mammoth in the room, its heft now sitting squarely on Greenland’s back.

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The common phrase “front lines of climate change” has a strangely militaristic undercurrent—one that seems out of place in the version of Greenland that I experience. Nonetheless, there’s a sense of urgency here, a startling tenuousness to each day. Glaciers crack like artillery in the distance, while bergs the size of small cities drift by on satellite images; it’s hard to ignore melting ice when it emerges from the fog to tower three stories above our sailboat. On land, changes are also evident, albeit less striking in form: from the encroachment of shrubs on tundra to unpredictable patterns of precipitation to the rapidly growing demand for tourism, the “new Arctic” is rising fast.

For Greenlandic peregrines, the impacts of warming are decidedly mixed. All of the researchers I spoke to emphasized that extreme weather events, including heavy rainfall and large temperature swings, can be fatal for nesting birds. Kurt Burnham describes heart-rending footage of a female peregrine brooding her chick in a downpour: “She did everything she could to keep the chick dry, but it died in the end. She had to throw it out of the nest.”

Warmer summers have also given rise to new residents such as mosquitoes, which have moved into the Pituffik area within the past two decades. Besides being nuisances, mosquitoes can carry diseases such as avian malaria, which, though not yet detected in Greenland, has infected falcons elsewhere in their range and decimated other bird species on remote islands. Even insects themselves can be deadly. In northern Canada, for instance, peregrine nestlings have been killed by hordes of biting black flies, whose abundance has been linked to warming-induced weather events.

Despite such challenges, peregrines have again demonstrated a remarkable ability to adapt. An increasing number of peregrines have nested at Pituffik over the past three decades, with birds venturing hundreds of kilometers north of their previously described range limits and possibly even edging out long-resident gyrfalcons. This trend is likely to continue, eventually making Greenlandic peregrines among the most polar of their species. As the ultimate shapeshifters of the avian world, such flexibility bodes well for their future. Though the warming Arctic may test their limits, “peregrines … are one of the generalist species that will likely survive,” predicts Travis Booms, a raptor biologist who has studied falcons across their Arctic range.

Meanwhile, with retirement on the horizon, Falk and Møller worked with Pinngortitaleriffik, the Greenland Institute of Natural Resources, to secure funding for a research position to continue monitoring how Greenlandic peregrines respond to environmental threats. As Falk notes, transitioning the project to a Greenlandic organization not only makes logistical sense but helps ensure its longevity. Despite a long history of coexisting with falcons, Inuit residents and their knowledge have been largely neglected in published bird surveys and reports. Most ornithological research in Greenland has been conducted by foreigners, creating a scattershot scientific record and limited local engagement. This is slowly changing, as evidenced by recent studies using Indigenous knowledge to document changes in fish and wildlife populations, as well as Greenlandic representation on circumpolar working groups. In this era of extinction, we need all hands on deck.

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Continuing up the west coast of Greenland after our week of following falcons in Tasermiut Fjord, my eight-year-old finds a peregrine feather on the tundra below a guano-smeared cliff. Eyes trained upward, I scan for falcons. This time, I hear no criii-criii-criii from above, see no hovering wings or streaks of motion. The birds have apparently moved on, leaving only gray clouds and silence.

Written in the peregrine’s graceful flight is a story worth recalling: the possibility of redemption, the promise that the rarest of the rare may once again become blessedly common—if we care enough to act quickly. Across their expansive range, the birds plummet from the sky like exclamation marks, declaring we are still here.

When global peregrine populations still hovered on the cliff of extinction, Bill Mattox wrote: “I hope that our river cliffs and streams will once again be used by peregrines … I would like my sons to experience what I consider one of nature’s greatest thrills—seeing wild falcons hurtling through the air near their nesting ledges.”

Mattox’s hope was realized, thanks in part to the dedication of biologists like him; now, it’s up to us to decide what comes next.

Every generation leaves a legacy, a feather in the sand. Resting on my sons’ small shoulders—and all of ours—is the future of Arctic-nesting falcons and the dozens of other species that call this region home. What stories from the field will our grandchildren tell? Who will be their heroes, armed with Tonka trucks and climbing harnesses?

The outcome depends on far more than a new cohort of biologists. It will take a global frameshift to stem the carbon output that is heating our planet faster than we can document it. It will take many lifetimes to correct our environmental missteps. But progress is incremental and motivation personal—perhaps we should measure this shift not only in tonnes of invisible carbon dioxide or centimeters of sea level rise, but in terms that speak from the heart: one nest, one love affair, one falcon aficionado at a time.

One of the killer whale’s most distinguishing features is its saddle patch: an area of gray or white coloration behind its dorsal fin. Each killer whale has a distinct saddle patch, just as humans have distinct fingerprints. Scientists and other observers can use these patches both to identify individuals and to differentiate one ecologically divided population from another.

Researchers from Finland, New Zealand, and Canada recently set out to better understand how saddle patches differ in shape and size within and between killer whale groups. They collated photographs of nearly 4,000 individual whales from 48 groups of killer whales from around the world and analyzed the shapes and sizes of saddle patches, looking for patterns.

The wooden fishing boat chugs across Comau Fjord, a finger of dark water wedged between the snowy peaks of Chilean Patagonia. A Chilean flag flaps in the wind above a hand-painted black cormorant on the bow. Inside the boat’s cabin, Boris Hernández, a fisherman who is among the few settlers in this remote fjord, peers through foggy windows. With one hand on the throttle, he steers to a spot fixed in his mind but otherwise indistinguishable from its surroundings. He cuts the engine, pulls his yellow beanie over his ears, and steps out onto the deck. A sheer cliff looms ahead.

“Right here,” Hernández says in Spanish. He points to the watery depths. In this very spot, Hernández has pulled up fishing nets tangled with the white, knobby branches of dead coral. Their skeletons call to mind the architecture of some distant tropical reef, but Desmophyllum dianthus isn’t your average warm-water coral. Instead of forming shallow reefs full of charismatic fish, D. dianthus thrives in total darkness and near-freezing temperatures, at depths of up to 2,000 meters. Instead of partnering with photosynthetic algae within its cells for food, it catches and kills plankton and tiny shrimp with stinging tentacles. And while D. dianthus and other cold-water corals live throughout the world’s oceans, including the Antarctic—providing habitat at least as critical as that of tropical coral reefs—the deep, inhospitable conditions they prefer make them difficult to study.

Only here, in the icy waters of Comau and two other nearby fjords, does D. dianthus live close enough to the surface that open-water scuba divers can reach it without any special equipment. Just 30 meters below us, vertical walls dense with thickets of D. dianthus and several other coral species stretch straight down into the inky gloom.

From Hernández’s boat, though, there’s nothing to see but water so dark it appears more black than blue. That water is the reason why D. dianthus survives so close to the surface. Sediment-rich fresh water from rainfall and melting glaciers floats atop the salt water, forming a light-blocking layer that darkens the environment below. Thanks to this quirk, scientists in Comau Fjord can study the basic biological processes of D. dianthus in ways that would be impossible in its normal deep-sea habitat. And these days, “more people are interested in learning about [the corals],” Hernández says. He’s become something of a scientific guide, ferrying researchers, a few tourists, and even the rare intrepid journalist to Comau’s coral gardens.

In June 2024, an international team of scientists dove into these waters to collect samples. Now, the coral—and the scientists—wait in a dark, refrigerated lab borrowed from a government fisheries agency on Chiloé Island, Chile, 90 kilometers across the Gulf of Ancud. At any moment, the scientists are hoping to witness something no one has ever seen before—D. dianthus spawning and making new coral babies in a lab.

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The three WhatsApp messages arrive in all caps and in quick succession: BABIES. ARE. COMING. The messages have the intended effect: Rhian Waller sits bolt upright in bed, checks the time—11:00 p.m.—and pulls on her coat. A marine biologist at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden, Waller has been waiting for this moment for days; the coral her team had carefully extracted from Comau Fjord a month earlier and watched 24/7 in shifts ever since is finally ready to spawn.

Waller races beneath the frosty, star-filled sky of a winter night to the equally cold lab, where she joins PhD candidate Diego Moreno Morán, originally from Mexico, and Chilean graduate student Ignacia Acevedo-Romo. The cold doesn’t bother Waller—she’s spent her career in it, chasing winters from hemisphere to hemisphere, Sweden to Chile, Alaska to Antarctica, trying to catch cold-water corals during their spawning season. She’s one of only a handful of people worldwide who study cold-water coral reproduction and is renowned for her dedication to getting samples by any means necessary—from century-old museum collections and on ship and submarine expeditions at depths of up to 5,000 meters, even in stormy winter weather.

Despite such efforts, scientists still know nothing about the reproductive behaviors of 96 percent of cold-water coral species, including D. dianthus, one of the most widespread and common cold-water corals. With such corals under increasing threat from climate change and deep-sea trawling, mining, and drilling, better understanding D. dianthus could help ensure its survival worldwide. In particular, figuring out how and when it spawns may be critical to burgeoning efforts to restore deep-sea coral ecosystems around the globe that have been damaged by industry.

Waller arrives at the lab just in time. Nearly as soon as she gets there, the coral—dangling upside down like tiny red, orange, pink, and white tentacled palm trees—puts on a dramatic show. The females inflate, their semi-translucent tentacles filling with hundreds of tiny orange eggs released in a steady, delicate stream through their open mouths. Not to be outdone, the males spurt clouds of milky-white sperm into the water, then deflate, limp and exhausted. The scientists literally ooh and ah as they watch.

“Any hesitation you have because you’re really tired kind of goes away as soon as you enter this room,” Waller says. “There’s so few people on the planet that have ever seen this happen, especially in deep-sea species.”

The researchers work for hours, hands in the icy water, gripping glass pipettes and collecting sperm and eggs, filling test tubes, pairing off the gametes, and filling refrigerated incubators with vials. The sun will rise before it’s time for them to warm frozen hands, cracked from exposure to seawater, and finally rest. Six or so hours later, they’ll know if their efforts were worth it.

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Cold-water corals have been known to exist for centuries. In the mid-1700s, apothecaries in Bergen, Norway, sold coral amulets from fragments pulled up in fishing nets to ward off the plague. Contemporaneous natural historians like Bishop Erich Pontoppidan drew beautiful diagrams, theorizing that the corals were rocks or maybe plants. Research came in fits and starts following new technological developments. In the 1860s, with dredges and steam-powered winches, natural historian Charles Wyville Thomson pulled up great masses of living coral from the seabed off the Scottish coast, disproving the azoic theory of the day that the deep sea was a dead zone. (Pressure changes caused Wyville Thomson’s specimens to quickly die.) Then, in the 1950s, military sonar made seabed mapping possible. Everywhere scientists looked, they found massive rocky ridges and mountains which, in the 1970s when research submersibles became available, they found to be covered in reef-building coral species. On closer inspection, some of these underwater formations consisted entirely of coral skeletons—built from the ground up over millennia, teeming with forms of life that hadn’t yet been defined.

Marine biologist J. Murray Roberts, of the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, calls these coral mounds the “cities of the deep sea.” The corals that build them may grow mere millimeters each year, but some reach 300 meters, tall enough to engineer currents to drive organic material—food—from the surface to themselves. Cold-water corals have persisted this way for millions of years, thriving during interglacial periods and spreading to the poles, then dying off and retreating equatorially during ice ages or when food supplies changed. Some coral seamounts are so old that geochemists use them as climate archives, drilling through alternating layers of coral and glacial deposits to unravel the ancient ocean chemistry locked into the coral’s bony skeletons. One, found some 365 meters deep off the Hawaiian coast, is the oldest known continuously living marine organism on Earth, at 4,265 years old.

“It blows my mind,” says Michelle Taylor, a marine biologist at Essex University in England. “When there were people in Egypt considering making pyramids, [the larvae] landed. And then through all of the human time that’s happened since then, [the reef’s] just been getting a little bit bigger, getting another polyp, a little branch.”

Cold-water coral science took off in the 1990s, around the time that Roberts and Waller first joined the field. Commercial fishers were increasingly trawling the deep sea and bulldozing reefs scientists hadn’t even discovered, especially in international waters beyond the jurisdiction of individual nations. Today, scientists estimate trawling impacts nearly 14 percent of all continental shelves and slopes shallower than 1,000 meters. With modern gear, trawlers can scrape thousand-year-old coral gardens off the tops of seamounts in minutes to capture the fish hiding within them. Erik Cordes, a deep-sea ecologist at Pennsylvania’s Temple University, says that some sites were already flat fields of coral rubble when scientists first found them. Before the trawlers came through, these “were probably big cold-water coral reefs,” he adds. “We just never got to see them.”

Residents of these reefs—from cod to sponges, tube worms to brachiopods—rival the diversity of tropical reefs. They play a key role in the global carbon and nitrogen cycles, provide spawning grounds for commercial fish species, and they likely contain undiscovered pharmacological compounds. But because most people can’t see them, they receive only a fraction of the attention of tropical coral reefs.

To find and save the cold-water reefs that remain, Roberts and other scientists began using high-resolution tools, such as echosounders that can measure bathymetry and determine the shape and hardness of the seabed, along with remotely operated underwater vehicles with cameras. In the absence of oceanwide maps, they defined the niche where cold-water corals can live and fed that data into models to predict where corals could be. In places where corals were actually found, the United States, Australia, and New Zealand closed large areas to fishing. Meanwhile, in 2006, the United Nations required member states to protect vulnerable ecosystems like cold-water coral reefs from destructive fishing practices. Despite these protections, enforcement remains difficult, especially in international waters, and cold-water corals still face anthropogenic threats like trawling, deep-sea mining, and oil exploration.

Today, some 4,200 cold-water coral species have been discovered—more than double the number of known tropical corals. Every expedition turns up a couple of new species and often a new reef. Scientists estimate cold-water reefs cover at least twice the area that tropical reefs do, though their exact extent remains unknown.

These ecosystems and the diversity they contain, says Taylor, represent an “untold wealth. We should probably be allowed to investigate that before destroying it.”

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With shallow-water corals increasingly falling victim to hotter ocean temperatures and bleaching, cold-water corals may stand a better chance of surviving in the future. Yet, since they grow incredibly slowly—especially in the coldest, deepest parts of the ocean—reefs decimated by trawling haven’t recovered over the last 20 years. It may take centuries for meaningful recovery.

That’s why scientists are testing out active restoration—sinking live coral fragments into destroyed reefs to give new life a better chance of taking root. Of the 16 ongoing or upcoming restoration projects Taylor knows of, most are small scale, like a Spanish effort using fishermen to return corals they accidentally pull up in their nets to the sea. But some have ambitious goals. Researchers in Norway, Sweden, France, and Spain are planning large-scale restorations in the Mediterranean Sea and on the Mid-Atlantic and Arctic ridges, using artificial reef structures seeded with baby corals, while Roberts co-leads a multinational project to develop more pilots that can eventually scale up restoration work.

“So it’s very new. And one of the biggest hurdles for restoration is understanding reproduction,” says Taylor. “If you want to replenish an area, you need to understand how animals breed, or else you’re doing it quite blind.” It’s one thing to place adult corals on the seafloor. To know how far apart to install new reefs so that corals can “cross-pollinate,” as well as to understand whether the resulting larvae will be able to reach other populations further afield, requires a fundamental understanding of how corals reproduce—and each species is different.

Because ship-based expeditions to collect samples are incredibly expensive and time-consuming—not to mention dangerous, since most corals spawn during winter storm season—progress has been slow. “You have to be quite cussed and awkward to stick with deep sea corals,” says Roberts. “It’s really difficult. And the simplest question requires all of this kit.”

Which is why, when Waller learned that a pair of German biologists had found D. dianthus in relatively shallow Patagonian fjords, she raced to Chile. On the sheer cliff walls of the fjord, D. dianthus grows as a vertical marine animal forest—hundreds of thousands of individuals reaching out to dine on the plankton that rise to the surface every day and fall to the fjord’s bed every evening. While deep-sea D. dianthus grows short and stubby, in groups of two or three, and has a wide mouth, the fjord variety is long and slender, forming dense groves of individuals that reach into the water column to catch as much food as possible.

Her first dive in Comau Fjord some 15 years ago was like a “night dive in the middle of the day,” Waller says. She didn’t care that visibility was low even with her headlamp, or that her fingers were numb and clumsy, or that she had only a few minutes of air to spend 30 meters below the surface. “The first time I saw these [kinds of] deep-sea corals that I’ve only ever seen before through a submersible window,” she says, “it was really amazing. You know, I could stick my head in the coral, I could poke the coral, I could take the sample. That’s something you just can’t do with a robot or on a TV screen.” And accessible D. dianthus samples provided a unique opportunity—bringing live specimens back to the lab to watch them spawn.

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Back in the borrowed government fisheries lab on Chiloé Island, 28 D. dianthus specimens hang suspended in tanks within a larger tank, which cools them with a constant bath of filtered seawater, like a frigid bain-marie. For the month of July while the scientists live here, losing track of time in the dark and cold, Chiloé is Love Island for the coral contestants. Unlike most tropical corals, where entire reefs are made up of genetically identical polyps, D. dianthus is a solitary coral—each polyp is genetically distinct. That means the sex of a given specimen plucked from the fjord remains a mystery until it’s ready to reveal itself with a stream of eggs or spurt of sperm. “It would be wonderful if they color-coded themselves or something, but they don’t,” says Waller. “So we just have to watch and wait for them to really show us who they are.”

They may lack brains, but each individual coral seems to have a mind of its own, and after weeks the team has gotten used to the corals’ distinct personalities. Some tolerate the light of a flashlight or the slam of a door; others curl their tentacles at the slightest disturbance, preferring privacy—they’ll only do it with the lights off. The researchers running this show have their patience tested coaxing the coral contestants to cooperate. “They all do their own thing,” says Waller. “If they’re happy, they’ll spawn well; if they’re unhappy, then they just close up.”

Tonight, both males and females have chosen to spawn. After the team collects sperm—a frantic endeavor, as it dilutes quickly into the water—Waller and Acevedo-Romo set to work pipetting up eggs that have settled to the bottom of the tanks. Meanwhile, Morán crouches over a microscope, painstakingly counting individual sperm to determine concentrations and how far they can travel in the water to successfully reach and fertilize eggs.

Everything about the process—done in the cold, in comparative obscurity, and with methods that must be developed from scratch—is just a bit harder than studying tropical coral spawning. Tropical coral scientists snorkel through warm reefs on the one beautiful night when corals spawn all together under a full moon, collecting eggs and sperm by the bucket to take back to their labs. Sperm concentrations are so dense they’re measured by the color of the water. In cold-water reefs, on the other hand, only a few corals spawn at the same time, though each male produces a lot of sperm. And unlike tropical eggs, evolved to mix with sperm in surface waves, cold-water coral eggs aren’t adapted to touch the surface, so they must be gently pipetted one by one to prevent them from exploding.

“This is a question that I get a lot: why do you, from Mexico, having tropical corals in your country, why you’re suffering in the cold?” Morán asks as he works. His answer is nonchalant: “Someone needs to do it.”

With sperm and eggs counted and sorted, the team sets to work mixing different concentrations of each to learn the minimum needed for fertilization. The initial results are surprising enough that the scientists wonder if they’ve messed something up—D. dianthus needs shockingly low concentrations of sperm: roughly 500 per milliliter of water, compared to up to one million per milliliter for tropical corals. It’s a good evolutionary strategy for a coral that lives in a high-current environment that quickly spreads out eggs and sperm, Waller explains. Sperm can disperse over vast distances and still manage to fertilize eggs, which means D. dianthus can create new reefs throughout the world’s oceans, far from parent colonies.

The researchers combine eggs and sperm from various females and males to see which pairings are more compatible, and swap newly declared male and female coral contestants around in tanks to try to generate more larvae. In between, they clean glassware, take hot showers, guzzle tea, moisturize cracked hands, and nap. During the spawning window of a few weeks, each coral can spawn once or multiple times, rarely coordinating with its neighbors. No one knows when the next spawning will happen; the team has to be ready to go at any time. “It’s a constant cycle,” says Waller. “Everything’s on their timeline … We have no control, and that’s okay.”

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To illustrate just how little scientists know about cold-water corals’ critical first life stage, Waller points to Primnoella chilensis, a whip coral that grows on horizontal steps in Comau Fjord. Waller’s team snipped specimens on a whim while collecting D. dianthus; now, in a separate tank in the lab, P. chilensis sway in the slight current. Up close, they look like orange pipe cleaners—twiggy stalks covered in whirls of tiny polyps.

Waller expected P. chilensis to be a broadcast spawner like D. dianthus, but her team found that instead, the females brood their young, taking in packets of sperm to fertilize eggs in the nooks and crannies of their long bodies and then dropping fully formed larvae that crawl around the tank’s bottom. That finding has implications for possible future restorations and connectivity models, because crawling larvae can’t travel nearly as far as swimmers that hitch rides on ocean currents.

Cordes, the deep-sea ecologist, is keeping a close eye on this kind of work. Since 2010, he’s studied how the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico damaged cold-water reefs. Now, with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), his team (which includes one of Waller’s former students) has cast replica reef skeletons out of coral sand and concrete and installed an initial test structure with eight coral fragments attached. It’s the world’s first truly deep attempt at cold-water coral restoration, at a depth of around 1,000 meters; last year, a NOAA team conducted a similar trial in shallower water. It’s too soon to tell whether either effort will be successful, but the hope is to restore the physical structure and habitat function of damaged reefs without having to wait centuries.

“The deep ocean is a very big place. We can put these artificial reefs down everywhere we want, but only if there’s a good source of larvae are they going to actually turn into real cold-water coral reefs,” Cordes says. And the only way his team can ensure larvae make it to the artificial reefs is if they know how larvae move and how their movement matches up with complex ocean currents. “Without that information, we’re just putting a bunch of rocks down in the deep sea, and they’re just going to sit there.”

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About six hours after mixing sperm and eggs in the Chiloé Island lab, the team returns, triumphant, to vials of D. dianthus embryos. Under the microscope, one cell becomes two, two become four, and four become eight. The proto-coral babies look, Morán quips, like tiny yellow cloudberries, “the best berry” back in Sweden, where he studies under Waller. After a few more divisions in this “berry phase,” the offspring become official larvae: the first of their species ever bred in a lab. The team moves them to larger flasks of filtered seawater flush with oxygen, where the larvae will have more room to grow.

A few days later, the babies are visible to the naked eye—they look like flecks of gold dust or glitter slowly swirling around, or yeast right after it’s stirred into warm water but before it dissolves. Acevedo-Romo extracts a few into a petri dish. Under a microscope, their little yellowish bodies, about twice the width of a human hair, are covered in tiny hairs of their own that they use to swim. The hairs grow on one side first, she explains, so the larvae swim in circles until they grow more and learn to steer, swimming up higher and higher in the flask.

After a few more days, the larvae are fully developed. In the wild, these delicate deep-sea dandelion seeds would be ready to drift for hundreds of kilometers, riding ocean currents for weeks or more before deciding on a place to settle, attaching to rocks, elongating their bodies, and ultimately transforming into coral polyps to live out the rest of their lives across centuries. Scientists hypothesize that D. dianthus first arrived in Comau Fjord from the deep sea in this way, propelled by currents over an unusually short continental shelf and into coral utopia—plenty of food, free real estate in bare rock walls, and relatively stable temperatures and currents.

Yet, even as Waller’s team answers fundamental questions about coral reproduction to inform faraway restorations, the Patagonian fjord they pull their specimens from is changing rapidly. Corals now spawn a full month earlier than they did when Waller first dove there in 2008, perhaps because of warming temperatures. “You’re trying to study them and trying to get this baseline, and it’s like, is it baseline at this point, when there’s so much change already happening?” Waller asks. Since there aren’t consistent temperature records for the fjord, it’s impossible to know.

And despite Comau’s status as a marine protected area, salmon farms are increasingly moving in, spewing organic pollution from feces and leftover food. In 2012, scientists discovered a mass coral die-off at a sampling site that just weeks before had hundreds of thousands of healthy corals. Within two months, most specimens were dead.

Jürgen Laudien, an ecologist at Germany’s Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research, determined that nutrient pollution from nearby aquaculture farms had helped fuel a bloom of algae that ultimately killed the corals. Another massive algal bloom in 2021 killed millions of salmon and more coral, staining the water and releasing a pungent smell that lasted for days.

Still, as creatures that have survived thousands of years’ worth of climactic and geologic upheavals, cold-water corals may have built-in resilience to changes in temperature and acidity. Comau Fjord is a natural laboratory for time travel, Laudien says. Its depths are already as acidic as the entire ocean is expected to be by the turn of the century, so it offers a glimpse into the future that cold-water corals face worldwide. Some scientists fear that rising ocean acidity will dissolve the bases of many of the planet’s massive seamounts; by the year 2100, some 73 percent of cold-water reefs are predicted to be in water too acidic for corals to calcify and form skeletons. Corals that Waller studies in Antarctica are already suffering—sometimes when she rubs them underwater, her hand comes away covered in chalky, dissolved skeleton.

But some research suggests D. dianthus in the fjord is doing better than expected—the coral is able to raise the pH in the space between its living polyp tissue and its skeletons enough to make calcification possible, even in acidic conditions. Raising the internal pH comes at a significant energy cost, which corals can afford in the fjord where food is abundant, but may be less able to afford in the nutrient-poor deep sea. And no one knows whether larvae can survive temperature, acidity, or salinity changes.

Ultimately, the long-term fate of cold-water corals is simply one more mystery in a field riddled with the unknown. But given that Comau Fjord gives scientists an opportunity to study the secrets of the deep seas, the answers may lurk just below the surface of fisherman Boris Hernández’s boat.

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Back in Comau Fjord, Hernández ties up his boat to the dock and walks back to the cabin that he built by hand and lives in year-round, with a view of a flat-topped peak called El Tambor. It’s a cloudless, sunny winter day, the kind that would have been remarkable 20 years ago but now comes increasingly often. The forest is lush and snowless. A small, rotund, orange bird, a chucao, hops across the path to the cabin. Way across the fjord, we can see the tops of salmon farm cages, just visible above the water.

Inside the cabin, framed photos of D. dianthus hang on wood-paneled walls beside a portrait of Hernández’s children. Books about Comau’s biodiversity sit in an organized stack on an end table; they’re written in English, which Hernández can’t read, but he keeps them anyway. Carefully, the fisherman lifts a dry, white coral skeleton from the windowsill and points to a piece of monofilament fishing line running through its trunk. The coral grew around it for years before dying.

For decades, Hernández knew little about the ecosystems this coral came from, and even less about the coral itself. Today, he understands more—that the places corals live are also the best for fishing, for example, because of the habitat they create. He’s glad to have played a small role in helping humans better understand the intricacies of cold-water corals. Sitting by the crackling fire in the wood stove, Hernández reflects on the value that this information may play in the future of reefs, both outside his door and globally. “The worst mistakes,” he says, “are made by not knowing.”

Each summer, thousands of bluebottles (also known as Portuguese man-of-wars) wash up along the shores of Sydney, Australia. These remarkable relatives of jellyfish are actually colonial organisms: each is made up of four kinds of specialized, interdependent bodies called zooids. One zooid provides the gas-filled sail; when the wind catches, it whisks the bluebottle across the ocean’s surface. The other zooids take care of hunting, digestion, and reproduction.

Some of the bluebottles that arrive in Sydney get trapped in shallow rock pools, which is where I like to photograph them, because they’re more protected there from currents and waves. With their electric-blue bodies and yellow-tipped tentacles, bluebottles contrast beautifully against a dark-water background. I have to be careful, though: the tentacles pack powerful venom for catching and killing prey, such as larval fish. Although not usually deadly to humans, the sting can be nasty.

For this particular image, I went out at sunrise so I could use backlighting to isolate the bluebottle from its background. I also added a touch of artificial strobe light to illuminate its lower portion.

One of the biggest mistakes novice children’s book writers make is to assume that a story must teach something. An overt message—share, don’t be a bully, eat your veggies—can make for a boring book. There can, of course, be a lot to learn in children’s books, but it takes a deft hand to avoid being didactic. Several of this season’s marine-themed books tackle big subjects—death, extinction, fear, even a lost toy (a monumental disaster for some). But in the hands of these skilled writers and illustrators, any takeaway messages are secondary to a good story well told. First and foremost, these creators offer rich language, characters and places to care about, and beguiling adventures. Along the way, they help us learn something, too.

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Dive, Dive into the Night Sea
Text and illustrations by Thea Lu
32 pp. Candlewick Studio

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Life After Whale: The Amazing Ecosystem of a Whale Fall
Text by Lynn Brunelle
Illustrations by Jason Chin
48 pp. Neal Porter Books

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It Bears Repeating
Text by Tanya Tagaq
Illustrations by Cee Pootoogook
24 pp. Tundra Books

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Pau: The Last Song of the Kaua‘i ‘Ō‘Ō
Text and illustrations by Tony Piedra and Mackenzie Joy
40 pp. Candlewick Press

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Have You Ever Heard a Whale Exhale?
Text by Caroline Woodward
Illustrations by Claire Victoria Watson
32 pp. Pownal Street Press

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Sea Snooze
Text by Sarabeth Holden
Illustrations by Emma Pedersen
32 pp. Inhabit Media

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Super Ocean Weekend: The Ultimate Underwater Adventure
Text and illustrations by Gaëlle Alméras
172 pp. Greystone Books

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My Bunny Lies Over the Ocean
Text by Bill Richardson
Illustrations by Bill Pechet
36 pp. Running the Goat Books

When I was a teenager in the mid-1990s, I had a friend whose family owned an unimproved lot on Dabob Bay, a bay off a fjord nestled deep in the southern Salish Sea, in Washington State. My group of friends, almost all of us the broke, angst-ridden, poorly supervised children of divorce, would camp there on weekends. We swam, sunbathed topless without sunscreen, smoked weed and drank liquor purloined from our parents, and danced around bonfires listening to Portishead. The rocky beach was flush with oysters, and we shucked them in situ and swallowed them alive, or else roasted them over the fire. All day we’d feed the bonfire, heating big rocks, and at night we’d drag the hot rocks into a dome of cedar branches with a tarp over the top. We’d sweat until we were dizzy, then race naked to the shore and dive into the water.

Now, decades later, we’ve scattered and grown responsible. I quit drinking and always apply sunscreen when sunbathing topless. Like my friends, I buy most of my food at Costco and Trader Joe’s. All of us are Very Busy People. We stare at our phones and we sit in traffic and we type “I apologize for the delayed response” as we endeavor to achieve inbox zero. When we get together, we talk about the outrageous cost of housing, our kids, and how our retirement accounts are looking (not great).

But the halcyon days of youth linger in the mind the way the briny taste of an oyster lingers on the palate. My friend Julia writes in the group chat one day, nostalgic, saying that she had just assumed life would always be like that—and then it wasn’t. “I’ve never again had an oyster I didn’t pay absurd amounts of money for,” she says. “I’ve never again eaten oysters until my belly was full.”

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Julia now lives in London, England, but I’ve returned to the coastal Pacific Northwest after decades inland. So what’s my excuse? Why haven’t I harvested shellfish for more than 25 years? I call up Camille Speck, the Puget Sound intertidal bivalve manager at the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife, to see if collecting and eating bivalves is still a thing. Her answer surprises me, given that my youthful experiences of eating wild shellfish feel like semimythical memories from a bygone golden age.

Shellfishing is not just still a thing, she tells me, it’s kind of trendy, at least in Washington. Most shellfish populations are still in good shape, and safe to eat as long as the water is clear and cold. Half the harvestable surplus of shellfish is reserved for Washington’s Indigenous tribes; the other half is available to anyone with a license. State managers set limits and seasons to make sure public beaches aren’t overharvested. And although there’s no danger of running out any time soon, shellfish stocks need to be managed more thoughtfully these days. Since the COVID-19 pandemic, there’s been “an enormous spike in interest” in harvesting shellfish, according to Speck.

I’m not surprised that people have turned to the intertidal for solace during times of crisis. Shellfishing elicits some of the most primal positive emotions of our species: the dopamine rush of searching for rewards, and the deeply ancient bliss of finding food outside with your kin. The oldest known shell middens—heaps of empty shells left by human harvesters—are found in southern and northwestern Africa and date back to the Last Interglacial, around 128,000 years ago. But scientists assume people have been eating bivalves for much longer, essentially as long as humans have lived on coasts. Some anthropologists even think our aptitude for gleaning in the intertidal kicked off the population boom that eventually nudged humans to explore beyond our homelands in Africa.

Speck says that she enjoys wholeheartedly promoting the pastime of gathering shellfish to contemporary humans, since there are plenty to be had. She mentions she is leading a Digging for Dinner clamming workshop in April near Quilcene, Washington, just down the road from Dabob Bay, so I gather up some of my old high school friends to attend. (Julia can’t make it, alas.) We have stayed in touch and maintain a busy group chat, but we don’t often manage to wriggle out of the grind of caring for our kids, working more than full-time, and looking after aging parents. For most of us, it’s been decades since we ate anything we didn’t pay for.

We rent a cabin from a guy who moved to the misty moss-draped Olympic Peninsula in Washington from Los Angeles, California, seeking tranquility and rest. He seems a little lonely, though. The weather is rough. Wind picks sheets of water up off the beach and hurls them in our faces. Speck calls it “nose-drip weather.” Luckily, clamming for Manilas is dead easy. On the right beach, you just rake through the top few centimeters of sand and there they are, simply waiting to be plucked: fat little clams with ridged shells in subtle earth tones, pale grays, and rosy taupes and creams. They feel absurdly abundant. “What a gift!” someone calls out. The hardest part is keeping count.

Each clam must be at least 3.8 centimeters across the longest part of the shell. My friend Kim talks to the clams as she rakes them out of the sand. To the little ones she says, “Okay baby, you can go back.” To the big ones she says, “Gotcha!” “I like bargaining with nature,” she explains. We each get our limit of 40 clams in less than 20 minutes.

I worry that because it happened so quickly, we didn’t fully experience the harvest together. But we make up for it by cooking together slowly at the cabin while catching up. We purge the clams in salt water for hours, then scrub and rinse them. My friend Cedar is highly fastidious, but her vigilance ensures our clam bucatini is 100 percent sandless. The clams are buttery, firm, and oceanic but assertively meaty. We invite our host, who has never gone clamming himself, to eat with us. He sits on the stairs and tells us about his life.

It would not have remotely occurred to us to share our dinner with this man if we had picked up sandwiches or even purchased the clams from a fishmonger. It was because they were acquired outside of the cash economy, because they were just generously given to us by the Ocean herself, that we felt the urge to share.

Though it’s been a long time since I’ve dug clams or gathered oysters, I’m probably the biggest forager among my friends. I spend a decent amount of time in the woods hunting for mushrooms, and I married into the kind of family that hunts and fishes and gifts us venison, duck, and salmon. Last year I moved to Portland, Oregon, and with my husband and kids, put in a legit vegetable garden where we grew tomatoes, kale, herbs, and long, pale, curved Armenian cucumbers that wouldn’t fit in the fridge.

I’ve noticed that I treat all this noncommercial food very differently than I treat the stuff I get at the grocery store. Bought food is purchased and then eaten by my immediate family—or not. If we have to throw some out, I feel guilty, but only for a moment. Grown, gathered, hunted, or foraged food is almost always shared. We bring it to people as gifts; we serve it at dinner parties; we mail it to family members. Recently, my husband’s uncle sent us a flat-rate box filled with hot peppers he grew on Whidbey Island, Washington. I used some to make harissa, which I then gave to my cousin. And this noncapitalist food is almost never wasted. If we must build a whole meal around the one eggplant we managed to grow, we will try. If we have to force tomatoes on neighbors and co-workers, we will.

My 12-year-old son says mushrooms, clams, and berries gathered by family or friends taste better than purchased food because of the “satisfaction” of acquiring them. I think this is another way of saying that the memory or the story of acquisition makes the food more meaningful. We focus on it more. We don’t mindlessly inhale it while doomscrolling or standing in front of the sink. And attention awakens the taste buds by giving them access to our focused consciousness, allowing us to enjoy the signals they send to our brains. We pay attention, which can be a form of respect.

When we buy food, we pay for it with money. Our relationship is with the vendor. The food is an object for sale. But when we acquire food with our own bodies, our relationships are with the organisms we’re eating, and with the lands and waters where they live.

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I haven’t gotten shellfish out of my system, so in August, I go to Twanoh State Park, Washington, on a busy Sunday to interview shellfish harvesters. Families speaking Ukrainian are setting up to cook lunch on the grass; Twanoh is a well-known gathering spot for Ukrainian émigrés, said to be somewhat reminiscent of the beaches on the Black Sea. On the shore, a symphony of cheerful talk in a dozen languages is peppered with the cries of seabirds. People in little knots and circles are digging clams and gathering oysters at low tide. As far as I can tell, everyone is harvesting in a group. I approach one woman who looks like she is foraging solo, but it turns out her quarry is beautiful stones: a different, more individualistic quest.

At Twanoh, one can dig 40 Manila clams per person per day until the season closes. Oyster season runs longer, but you must shuck the oysters on the beach and leave the shells, because they make the perfect substrate for the next generation.

Both Manila clams and Pacific oysters were introduced into this ecosystem by humans. Pacific oysters were introduced in 1919 by Japanese American oyster farmers. In Puget Sound, Washington, oyster farmers preferred the Japanese species to the quarter-sized native Olympia oysters, which were in decline. (Today, Olympias are apparently making a comeback.) The Pacific oyster spread widely beyond commercial farms and naturalized. Manila clams accidentally came along with the oysters, but like Pacific oysters, they have been welcomed instead of reviled as “invasive.” It helps to be delicious—and basically harmless. Manilas coexist with the native littleneck clams; Pacific oysters are lauded for filtering the water and creating reef habitat. The state actively seeds both species, scattering babies into the wild to replenish their populations from the harvest.

I approach one young man in purple shorts who is sitting on a turquoise stool with a plastic container of shucked oysters between his feet. “We’ve been doing this since I was a kid,” Jeremy Rivera says. His parents emigrated from the Philippines. He comes out, he says, to spend time with his parents, aunts, uncles, and cousins. The family assembles at the park, sometimes after going months without seeing each other. “It’s nice to get your food from outside the commercial system,” he adds. Today, his nieces, 15 and 11, are joining for the first time.

Another multigenerational family tells me something similar. They are from all over the area, but they gather at Twanoh. “It is kind of meditative, like doing yard work,” one woman tells me, slowly raking. “No rush; take your time.”

“We’ve done this since before it was cool,” another family tells me. “It is a really easy activity; you just need a shovel and a nice day.”

Some people prefer not to give their names, but everyone happily shares their favorite way to relish the sea’s bounty. I gather recipes from across the beach: clams and oysters steamed, stir-fried, grilled, deep-fried, and served with garlic butter, thyme, rosemary, salt, and pepper—“something not too complicated”—or steamed with lime and fish sauce, Vietnamese style.

Erin Tang tells me her family is from South China, so shellfish was part of her childhood. Now she takes her own children clamming. They are still just toddlers, getting blissfully sandy. “It is really important to me that we stay within the limits set by Fish and Wildlife,” Tang says. “Then everyone can have the experience.”

But for how long? What about climate change? Our warming climate is heating the seas, which means more closures to protect people from paralytic shellfish poisoning and other pathogens. And as more carbon dioxide builds up in the atmosphere, it also builds up in Earth’s oceans, raising the acidity of the water, possibly to a point where it begins to affect the calcium carbonate of mollusk shells. I don’t want to linger on this point because it is too much for me to bear the thought of a world without enough shellfish to go around. But there it is. Just as the inevitability of death always lingers at the periphery of even our purest joys, so now too does the awareness of climate change hover at the edges of our consciousness every time we enjoy the natural world around us.

I refocus on the day, the moment, the difficult task of clambering across the shell-covered beach. A small boy from Olympia, Washington, named Jayce, shows me a tiny eel-like gunnel fish he’s found under a rock. “It is good to get him away from the screen,” his mom says, while his dad shucks oysters on a plywood table he’s set up. An old woman and a very small boy squat together on a rugged rubble of oyster shells. His rubber boots are decorated with stars and planets.

The tide is coming back in. I flip through my notes. I realize every single group I spoke to said they harvested shellfish to spend time with their family. Most people mentioned family before they said anything about the taste of the clams or oysters.

Before I get in my car to go home, I figure I should collect some clams to bring to my own family, lovely people whom I am suddenly missing. I am in possession of an annual license, after all. I hastily collect 40 Manila clams, digging with an empty oyster shell. Digging all alone, I feel a bit weird, even suspect. The action feels more nakedly extractive than when undertaken in a convivial team.

I don’t have anything to carry my clams home in alive, so I stop at the marina in Union, Washington, hoping to buy a bucket. All they have is wine, high-end cheese, charcuterie, and quirky souvenirs for tourists, but the owner finds a plastic container for me in the back. My 40 clams ride back home with me on the floor of the car, and we steam them the next day for dinner.

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Wild foods are a significant source of calories for an estimated one billion people. A study of rural, lower-income households in tropical or subtropical Africa, Asia, and Latin America found that 77 percent harvested wild foods, and a total of 461 types of food were collected. When poor people gather food, it gets called “subsistence;” when rich people do it, it’s “recreational.” I think there are a lot of similarities between these two supposedly disparate activities: the pleasure in the act and in the eating, the way we share what we find.

Still, many of the people I interview at Twanoh aren’t here out of economic necessity. Many have driven a long way to get to the beach; when you add up the money spent on gas, tools, and the shellfish license (although at just US $17.40 per year for Washington residents, it’s a bargain), plus the time invested, it is almost certainly easier and perhaps even cheaper to simply buy shellfish. You can get a pound of clams at Pike Place Market in Seattle, Washington, for $11.99 (or around $27 for a kilogram). Oysters are $18.99 a dozen, although Julia could pay up to $100 in a London restaurant. But the point is to bypass that kind of transaction—to gather shellfish yourself and eat them with your loved ones.

I cannot count the number of times I have read discussions on how the foam tray, cellophane wrap, and pre-butchered state of grocery-store meat alienate us from the living individual the meat once was. But all purchased food is at some level alienating; the economic transaction is salient and central, while the essential transaction—the moral and ecological transaction—between two groups, the eaters and the eaten, is elided.

Human cultures have created many religious, legal, and scientific frameworks in which to understand and shape this ecological transaction. A religious ritual in which people ask permission to harvest or kill is one framework. Laws are another. Some see the legal limits on harvest set by governments as infringements on their freedom; Tang sees them as an expression of a community’s commitment to share a resource and an experience. One could also see it as a contract between humans and shellfish. We will take you and eat you, but not all of you. We will not be greedy.

To keep our contracts with other species, those other species must be allowed to persist. We must harvest them gently enough so that they are still there to feed our kind centuries from now. I am an optimistic woman, and I do not believe that everything is worse than it used to be. In lots of places, the air and water are cleaner than they were when I was a kid. You can eat blackberries by the side of the road without them being coated in lead exhaust. But I feel the gnawing sense that so many others feel about the abundance of many species declining. The natural world seems thinner, somehow, than it did when I was a kid.

I remember, back in 1991 when I was 12 years old, spending the summer on Denman Island, British Columbia, one of the Gulf Islands between Vancouver Island and the mainland. My parents’ marriage had just busted up, so my mother scraped together the money to rent a house for herself and her three kids to heal there. I was sad about the divorce, but I knew even then it was for the best. Mom’s boyfriend Fernando came to visit on weekends, doing all the right things to get in good with me and my brothers. He brought us to the movies, bought us Nintendo-themed cereal, and took us oystering and clamming.

In my memory, the beaches of Denman are absolutely carpeted with life. The tide pools are crammed with urchins, sea squirts, jewel-toned sea stars, and coquettish octopuses. There’s kelp up to our ankles, clouds of sand fleas, fuzzy living sand dollars, and heaps upon heaps of oysters. My mother, more relaxed than I have ever seen her, shucks the oysters open with an elegant, competent insouciance, and we eat them raw.

I haven’t been back to Denman Island since that magical summer when I was 12. Even armed with peer-reviewed papers about broadly stable species population trends, I am afraid. I am afraid the beach will seem sparse and lifeless.

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How much of this sense of eroding abundance is real? It’s complicated. Some populations of wild organisms have declined since the 1970s; others are increasing, and most are stable. (You may have heard that we’ve lost 70 percent of wildlife since 1970; that statistic is based on the mathematically flawed Living Planet Index. While a few populations are experiencing catastrophic declines, most are not.) There is, as one study put it, “a balance of winners and losers in the Anthropocene.”

I think the reason that we nevertheless feel a kind of constant low-grade dread about nature is that the declines of the “losers” are genuine tragedies, whereas we don’t always know how to feel about the “winners.” Is the global expansion of Pacific oysters and Manila clams okay? How do I feel about the fact that there are now hummingbirds whizzing around my childhood home in Seattle in January? Change can feel like loss, even if it is gain.

What I miss is not worrying—about species abundance declines, about ecological change, about the Anthropocene. There was a certain carelessness with which my friends and I ate shellfish in our youth. We didn’t, at the time, marvel at the amazing experience we were having. We didn’t notice we were eating outside of capitalism, or that we were having a direct, unmediated relationship with another species, or that we were cementing our bonds of love and friendship by foraging and eating together. We did not think about how climate change could destroy oyster populations or how pollution could poison them. We did not feel lucky or grateful. We just reached out and took what was abundant and freely given. And that includes time—idle, analog time together. As Julia says, “I took it all for granted, thinking life would be full of camping trips with best friends on beaches and an endless supply of fresh oysters … but in reality, those occasions were so unique and fleeting.”

I like to imagine a future where people can take the abundance of nature for granted like lazy teenagers. Not in a profligate, wasteful way but in a confident way—a confidence that stems from trusting that our human cultural systems will ensure the continued abundance of nature for millennia to come. This is the utopia I dream of: a low sun, a beach fire, the bay as flat and cold as gray slate, a small pile of empty oyster shells growing slowly larger, the laughter of my friends.

As humanity works to slash greenhouse gas emissions and stem the pace of planetary warming, scientists, governments, and industry leaders are looking for low-carbon alternatives to fuel the future. Alongside renewables such as solar and wind energy, hydrogen gas is bubbling to the forefront as a fuel of choice—especially for energy-intensive processes like forging steel.

However, the carbon footprint of hydrogen gas is not necessarily as tiny as proponents argue. According to new research led by Kiane de Kleijne, who studies the environmental impacts of new technologies at Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands, hydrogen’s climate friendliness ultimately depends on many factors, not least of which are where and how the hydrogen is produced.

Today, most hydrogen gas is made from natural gas using a chemical process called steam reforming. This hydrogen—known as “grey hydrogen”—is highly polluting; for every kilogram of usable hydrogen gas produced, the process spits out emissions equivalent to 13.7 kilograms of carbon dioxide. A slightly better option is “blue hydrogen,” for which hydrogen gas production is coupled with a carbon capture and storage system. This can theoretically bring emissions down to around six kilograms of carbon dioxide per kilogram of hydrogen gas. However, carbon capture technology is expensive and largely unproven; it rarely reaches even modest levels of capture.

What’s really got experts’ attention is “green hydrogen,” which results when renewable energy—think solar or wind—is used to electrically split water into hydrogen and oxygen gases through a process known as electrolysis. The International Energy Agency, an intergovernmental organization, and many national governments claim that projects powered by green hydrogen produce no greenhouse gas emissions. This has spurred a flurry of subsidies from governments around the world designed to get the green hydrogen industry off the ground.

But green hydrogen isn’t free of carbon emissions just because electrolyzing water produces little planet-warming pollution. To get a true take on the environmental footprint of hydrogen gas, it’s important to consider the toll of everything else that goes into making and using it, such as building renewable energy and electrolysis infrastructure, storing the hydrogen, and shipping it around the world. These factors are collectively known as embodied emissions.

Government “policies are not designed with embodied emissions in mind,” says de Kleijne. But “if we don’t count them, we don’t see them.”

To get a better sense of the future footprint of the budding green hydrogen industry, de Kleijne and her colleagues estimated the embodied emissions that will likely result from the more than 1,000 green hydrogen projects planned to be built worldwide by 2030. The scientists analyzed each plant’s proposed design and electricity source and the emissions stemming from different methods of transporting hydrogen gas. Many projects, for instance, plan to ship their hydrogen gas by first converting it to liquid ammonia and then converting it back to hydrogen gas on the other end. But this conversion is energy intensive, and up to 30 percent of the hydrogen is lost in the process.

At best, de Kleijne and her team find that green hydrogen production creates around 2.9 kilograms of carbon dioxide–equivalent pollution for each kilogram of hydrogen gas produced. Then, depending on whether the gas is transported by pipeline or ship, add on another 1.5 or 1.8 kilograms of carbon pollution.

If these embodied emissions were included in official calculations, de Kleijne says, it would be difficult for many proposed green hydrogen projects to meet climate-related targets, such as the European Union’s renewable fuel threshold, which requires hydrogen fuels to produce less than 3.4 kilograms of carbon dioxide per kilogram of hydrogen to qualify as a clean fuel.

Mark Winfield, who studies sustainable energy and climate change at York University in Ontario, says the study reinforces the warning already being sounded by many scientists and environmentalists about green hydrogen. “Emissions can pile up through the life cycle, so we might not end up as far ahead as we thought,” Winfield says.

In general, de Kleijne says, green hydrogen will always be cleaner than grey and blue hydrogen, which also face the same challenges around embodied emissions. However, even within green hydrogen production, the analysis shows that some approaches are much greener than others.

The scientists find that the biggest differences between green hydrogen plants stem from the type of renewable energy used to power the electrolysis and how the plant is configured. Wind power is generally better than solar because building wind turbines has a lower carbon cost than deploying solar panels. And a green hydrogen plant connected to the wider electricity grid—meaning it can send any extra electricity it produces back to the grid—is better than a stand-alone facility.

Another big factor in determining the climate-friendliness of a particular facility is how far the plant is from the end user and how the hydrogen gets to them. Pipelines have the lowest emissions over short distances, while shipping is better over longer distances. “Avoiding transport is one of the most important conditions,” de Kleijne says, so building the plant near where the hydrogen will be used is key.

Zane McDonald, executive director of the industry-associated Open Hydrogen Initiative, says the hydrogen production industry is acutely aware of the need to account for embodied emissions; that’s why his group is developing a standardized method for estimating a project’s emissions. The goal, says McDonald, is to offer project leaders ways to reduce embodied emissions. There’s a strong financial incentive to do so. McDonald notes that in the United States the 45V tax credit, which supports the development of green hydrogen projects, gives more credit to cleaner projects.

“Having a policy that benefits you for investing in decarbonization measures—and erodes the competitive advantage of organizations that do not—is how we can ensure that organizations will start to make these investments,” McDonald says.

Winfield says de Kleijne’s work underlines the need to look at hydrogen production on a project-specific basis rather than making blanket assumptions about its green credentials. There will be times and places where renewable energy–powered hydrogen gas production will be a good option. But often, Winfield says, using renewable electricity to make hydrogen that will then be transported around the world just introduces extra unnecessary steps.

“We should do direct electrification where we can and only bother with hydrogen if there is a good use case that makes sense,” he says.

De Kleijne agrees. “If you can electrify something with renewable energy directly, just do that.”

1. A reckoning

It’s a blustery day in the autumn of 2023, and I’m standing in a roadside pullout in Northern California, looking at the past and future of the Klamath River.

Immediately upstream I see Iron Gate Dam—17 stories tall, nearly four times as wide— completely blocking its red-rock canyon. There are four such dams, with Iron Gate as the first and largest, in 60 kilometers of river rising to the northeast. It’s a stretch sometimes called Reservoir Reach, and it has shut salmon out of hundreds of kilometers of potential habitat in the Upper Klamath Basin for more than a century.

The dams are the river’s past.