Sea Change

Reviews / Votes

Girling pulls no punches in this passionate and blackly witty expose of the problems that face us . . . We can only hope that Girling's eloquent analysis of what is wrong might affect the decisions to be made. * CULTURE magazine, Sunday Times * This is a vivid and devastating account of the decline and fall of the precious waters lapping our coasts . . . [Girling] is an extremely good writer . . . he also manages to weave a wonderfully dry humour into the long and sorry catalogue of generations of neglect and short-sightedness . . . This is a book to make you think. * Daily Mail * Anyone who cares about the coast should read this book - before it is too late. * Nicholas Crane * Scarcely pausing for one slow and adoring gaze across the Norfolk coast he loves, Richard Girling plunges off from the first page into the most brilliant and devastating attack yet written on bungling, political weakness, incompetence and sheer slowness of those who are meant to be in charge of the seas around our shores. * Evening Standard * Richard Girling calls the sea our civilisation's "amniotic fluid". His story of its violation by oil pollution, over-fishing, climate-change-driven erosion and our belief that we have the wisdom to "manage" the marine environment is shocking. It's a story of arrogance, ignorance and greed, and in Girling's electrifying prose it becomes a parable of wilful matricide. * Richard Mabey * For centuries our sea, less our lands, was what characterised us as a people. Now we fly over it, seek it less for work and play, and fail to recognise that it is in crisis. Richard Girling's wonderfully informed, hard hitting and inspired account of what is happening on our shoreline shatters this ignorance. Sea Change is a book which seems to be energised by the ocean itself and one which could bring us back - just in time - to face the gains and losses of our coast. * Ronald Blythe, author of AKENFIELD *