Environmental journalist Alix Morris began this investigation of seals after a fatal great-white-shark attack off the coast of Maine in July 2020. The public discussion quickly blamed seals, portraying their recovering populations as “out of control” and calling for culls because seals might attract sharks near shore. Morris wanted to understand why an animal once nearly eliminated had become such a flashpoint.
Morris followed seals and the people whose lives intersect with them through a full annual cycle so she could see the animals’ lives season by season: breeding and parenting, feeding, migration or local movement, relationships, behavior, and the changing conditions in their marine ecosystems. That structure also let her examine the consequences of the seals’ recovery from near extinction rather than treating them as a simple conservation success story.
The “year” was a reporting and learning journey, not a year living exclusively alongside seals. She traveled, observed, and spoke with a wide range of people, including fishers whose catches or gear can be affected by seals, tribal communities with historical seal-hunting traditions and uses, seal-rescue workers, marine biologists, and conservationists.
At its heart, the book is about more than seals. Morris uses them to ask how people can coexist with recovering wildlife in ecosystems we have already altered. She has said she hopes readers come away with greater empathy—for seals and for the people who disagree about them—and a stronger sense of species’ interconnectedness, resilience, and adaptation