The Unnatural History of the Sea hits all my geek buttons: the author mines historical sources to reconstruct the natural world of the past, has a strong grasp of current research on ecosystem resiliency, and peppers the text with observations from his own research. The thesis of the book is that fishing has had an unimaginably large impact on the earth, most of which has gone unnoticed because of shifting baselines.

Part of me wants to quibble with the titular use of "unnatural" - why are humans always exempted from natural history as if we were aliens? But part of me couldn't think of a better title, either. ( )

This really is a fascinating and beautifully argued book. I chanced across it because I had been disappointed by Jared Diamond's Collapse and wanted to find something that dealt more rigorously with humans' approach to natural resource management. I know very little about the specifics of marine resources, but, as a detailed and specific, though very readable, case study, this way outclassed Diamond's offering. One of Roberts' more interesting points (though in retrospect it's an obvious one) is how processes of environmental change that outlast an individual's lifespan are underestimated because we assume that what we're used to is what has always been. We may notice limited change over our own lifetime, but this record is not passed on to subsequent generations. The result, after successive historic waves of marine exploitation, is that the species, volumes and sizes of fish we currently catch would have been laughed at by our 18th Century, and found totally incredible by our medievil, ancestors. Many of the detailed and well argued lessons that Roberts draws are very much applicable to other types of natural resources (minerals, energy, carbon absorbtive capacity). ( )