{"product_id":"not-on-my-watch-isbn-9780735279681","title":"Not on My Watch","description":"\u003cb\u003eNATIONAL BESTSELLER\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eAlexandra Morton has been called \"the Jane Goodall of Canada\" because of her passionate thirty-year fight to save British Columbia's wild salmon. Her account of that fight is both inspiring in its own right and a roadmap of resistance.\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAlexandra Morton came north from California in the early 1980s, following her first love—the northern resident orca. Then, in 1989, industrial aquaculture moved into the region, chasing the whales away. Soon Alex had shifted her scientific focus to documenting the infectious diseases and parasites that pour from the ocean farm pens of Atlantic salmon into the migration routes of wild Pacific salmon, and then to proving their disastrous impact on wild salmon and the entire ecosystem of the coast. \u003cbr\u003e     Alex stood against the farms, first representing her community, then alone, and at last as part of an uprising in which ancient Indigenous governance resisted a province and a country that wouldn't obey their own court rulings. She has used her science, many acts of protest and the legal system in her unrelenting efforts to save wild salmon and ultimately the whales—a story that reveals her own perseverance and bravery, but also shines a bright light on the ways other humans doggedly resist the truth. Here, she brilliantly calls those humans to account for the sake of us all.\u003cb\u003eNATIONAL BESTSELLER\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Morton’s book is a record of impassioned, long-term commitment and self-sacrifice. . . . We’ve been within a whisper of losing our wild salmon populations—as well as the endangered livelihoods of the mostly small-town and Indigenous wild salmon fleet families—if not for the work of this remarkable campaigner and researcher. . . . A modern day Joan of Arc story: her example of fighting for environmental, social, community, and multicultural justice deserves being taught to every B.C. student.” —2022 George Ryga Award judges\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“[O]ne of the most important reads to come out of B.C., if not the country, this year. . . . It’s a story that’s heartbreaking, infuriating, shocking, suspenseful, and inspiring. And it’s a tale that continues to unfold.” —\u003ci\u003eStir\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“[\u003ci\u003eNot on My Watch\u003c\/i\u003e] doesn’t read as an angry polemic. Rather, it’s an outline of a life spent standing up for something.” —Dana Gee, \u003ci\u003eVancouver Sun\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e“Alex Morton’s \u003ci\u003eNot on My Watch\u003c\/i\u003e, like \u003ci\u003eSilent Spring\u003c\/i\u003e, should touch off a national debate about rights and obligations, and while we’re at it, about decolonization. If \u003ci\u003eNot on My Watch\u003c\/i\u003e needs to be peer reviewed, those peers should include ordinary people with a thirst for justice and common sense. And every politician should be judged by their reaction to this book.” —\u003ci\u003eThe Tyee\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“This is an important book filled with cautionary tales for anyone who cares about the environment. It is also a moving and well written human story. Highly recommended.” —Tom Sandborn, \u003ci\u003eVancouver Sun\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"A devastating literary exposé of one of the greatest scandals of recent Canadian history. What begins as a wholly human memoir of a reluctant activist takes on the urgency of a murder thriller—one in which the victims are wild salmon, coastal communities, science and democracy.\" —\u003cb\u003eJ.B. MacKinnon\u003c\/b\u003e, author of \u003ci\u003eThe Once and Future World: Nature As It Was, As It Is, As It Could Be\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e“How does a scientist and mother fight both foreign-owned fish farm cartels and lying governments? Alexandra Morton provides a thrilling recipe: a wallop of persistence, three decades of science, cups of stubbornness and the salt of undaunted courage. If the Pacific Northwest Coast's wild salmon can survive our industrial assault on their very existence, credit must go to the indomitable courage of Alex Morton and a brave renaissance in First Nations governance.” —\u003cb\u003eAndrew Nikiforuk\u003c\/b\u003e, author of \u003ci\u003eEmpire of Beetle\u003c\/i\u003e and \u003ci\u003eSlickwater\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003e\"Not on My Watch\u003c\/i\u003e is an urgent, essential read for anyone who cares about the rapidly dwindling wild salmon population of British Columbia.  Meticulous, penetrating and passionate, Morton’s thorough exploration of the history and effect of placing an industrial zone in prime wild salmon habitat is chilling and infuriating.\" —\u003cb\u003eEden Robinson\u003c\/b\u003e, author of the Trickster Trilogy\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“If ever there was a Mother Teresa for the voiceless inhabitants of the rivers of Pacific Canada, for the salmon and orca whales and small-scale fishers and others, that unstoppable voice has been Alexandra Morton’s. Grounded in science, rooted in a just cause, driven to find answers that come only with painstaking work—and most importantly, right all along—Alexandra Morton endured decades of harassment, lies and threats by people who profit from destroying ages-old sources of life. Her resolute strength through it all will inspire new defenders of wild things and wild places for generations to come. Fundamentally, this is Alexandra Morton’s compelling, sometimes maddening story of unstoppable love.” —\u003cb\u003eCarl Safina\u003c\/b\u003e, author of \u003ci\u003eBecoming Wild: How Animal Cultures Raise Families, Create Beauty, and Achieve Peace,\u003c\/i\u003e and of \u003ci\u003eBeyond Words: What Animals Think and Feel\u003c\/i\u003eALEXANDRA MORTON is a field biologist turned activist who has done groundbreaking research on the damaging impact of ocean-based salmon farming on the coast of British Columbia. She first studied communications in bottlenosed dolphins and then the sounds of captive orcas at Marineland of the Pacific in California. She then moved to the remote BC coast and found herself at the heart of a long fight to protect the wild salmon that are the province's keystone species. She has co-authored more than twenty scientific papers on the impact of salmon farming on migratory salmon, founded the Salmon Coast Research Station, has been featured on \u003ci\u003e60 Minutes, \u003c\/i\u003eand has been key to many legal and protest actions against the industry, including the recent First Nations-led occupation of salmon farms on the Broughton.INTRODUCTION\u003cbr\u003eWonder and Resistance\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWhen I was a child I was drawn to animals, especially the wild ones, and to the ponds and forests where they lived. I was curious. I tracked them and watched them. No matter whether I was looking into the gold-flecked  eye  of  a  frog,  or  at  the  way  a  deer  held  her  ears  as  she  stepped out of the forest at sunset, animals were mysterious, beautiful and wise. When I turned eight, I knew wanted to become a scientist but I wasn’t sure how. The only picture of a woman scientist that I had seen was of Madame  Curie,  and  I  was  afraid  to  become  that  person  in  the  blurry picture  wearing  a  white  lab  coat.  At  the  same  time  I  realized  that  only small children “played with animals.” A growing dread consumed me. To grow up I needed to stop spending time in the woods and marshes. I still remember the sensation of stopping myself from looking under a piece of wood where I knew a snake almost certainly lay coiled.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThen  just  before  Christmas  1965,  I  received  an  issue  of \u003ci\u003eNational Geographic \u003c\/i\u003ewith  Jane  Goodall  on  the  cover.  I  stared  at  it.  The  outer world paused and went silent as I sank to the dark brown carpet of my mother’s  study.  I  pored  over  every  picture  of  this  beautiful  woman, looking  perfectly  happy,  who  studied  chimpanzees  in  the  frightening jungle. Was she real? I felt an explosion of joy as the walls I was building around myself crumpled and the inner compass I was trying to redirect slipped free. I would follow in the footsteps of Jane Goodall. That was my promise to me. Seeing those pictures of Jane gave me my life. Thank you so much, Jane, for allowing \u003ci\u003eNational Geographic\u003c\/i\u003e to expose your work and your paradise, no small sacrifice, I realized years later.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eOver the next decade, I read every book about scientists who, following in Goodall’s footsteps, went into the wilderness to study an animal. And I saw a pattern. While they began as people driven by curiosity and the need to understand, they inevitably became “activists,” though none of them used that term back then. The more they understood the animal  they  had  chosen  to  study,  the  more  urgently  they  felt  the  need  to stand in the way of the crushing advance of human appetite for the land on which the animal relied or for the creature itself. I felt sad for these scientists. They had to abandon the dream they had worked so hard for. They had to leave the jungle, savannah or ocean to confront the people who were causing the damage. Once the scientists found the perpetrators, they had to figure out how to stop them.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eDr. Jane Goodall did more than reveal the origins of our humanness through her science; she demonstrated that becoming a groundbreaking scientist didn’t require a loss of compassion. Other scientists criticized her heavily from the start for giving the chimps she was studying names instead of numbers. Today she admits in her lectures that she went into a  conference  on  primates  a  wildlife  biologist  and  came  out  an  activist, when  she  refused  to  accept  the  methods  of  her  colleagues,  who,  in  the name of science, were torturing primates in a way that horrified her.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eI  took  this  all  in  and  decided  I  was \u003ci\u003enot\u003c\/i\u003e going  to  be  shoved  off  my life’s  path.  I  was  going  to  plug  my  ears,  ignore  the  “issues”  and  follow my  dream  to  the  end.  I  was  going  to  decipher  the  language  of  some large-brained  non-human  species,  creating  a  Rosetta  stone  of  sorts  to end the solitude of my species. We needed to hear what another animal on  this  planet  was  saying,  I  thought,  because  it  seemed  that  we  were going mad in our isolation. A lofty aim for a teenager, I know, but this is what I wanted to do. Of course things are so much simpler when you are a child, and so I failed to stay true to my fifteen-year-old self. What I didn’t realize back then was that if I ignored the impact humans were having  on  the  animals  I  had  chosen  to  study,  I  would  end  up  studying their extinction.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIt gets even more complex. Scientists who go to learn about animals in the remote regions of our planet also meet Indigenous people. While the  peoples  and  cultures  that  evolved  over  thousands  of  years  in  one place are adapted to their home environment, the scientist is, in many ways, an introduced species.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e When I first arrived in the remote archipelago on the west coast of Canada,  where  I  still  live,  to  study  whales—my  chosen  large-brained mammal—I didn’t understand the land, the animals or the people. I had no  idea  how  to  respond  to  storms  or  predators  or  where  to  find  food. I  didn’t  immediately  recognize  the  difference  between  the  nomads  of the planet, meaning people who moved generation after generation, and the  people  who  spent  thousands  of  years  in  one  place.  Over  the  years I  have  encountered  instances  where  my  Indigenous  companions  have heard  and  felt  things  I  don’t.  Asking  them  questions  didn’t  help.  I  was simply not adapted to the place and did not have the internal hardware to perceive some things.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eHowever, the act of doing science—decades of continuously counting the number of birds or fish, the minutes between whale blows, the date  the  herring  arrived,  the  amount  of  rainfall—leads  to  a  gradual understanding of a place. I learned to expect the rush of black and silver  herring  schools  roiling  beneath  the  surface  of  the  Pacific  Ocean, pulling  huge  spring  salmon  in  their  wake,  with  the  A-clans  of  the northern resident orca on their tails. As I began to feel the pulse of this place,  I  perceived  the  difference  between  “normal”  and  exceptional. For  example,  a  healthy  run  of  salmon  as  opposed  to  a  run  of  salmon that never arrived. Seeing the missing pieces is important, too, because they affect the world as much as the things I can see.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eNo  scientist  can  spend  ten  thousand  years  becoming  finely  tuned to  a  place,  but  the  constant  counting,  measuring  and  weighing,  then analyzing data to reveal the trends of life, can bring scientists into alignment  with  Indigenous  viewpoints.  As  a  result,  when  the  big  machines of industry advance on us, whether clear-cutting forests, damming rivers  to  flood  valleys  or  exterminating  animals  for  profit,  scientists  can see the running cracks as they form, undoing the entire web of life. We see the disappearances. We are emotionally hurt by the loss and naturally move to take a stand with the people of the place, the Indigenous people. In all the books I read as a child I didn’t notice this alliance, but when I went back to them as an adult I realized it was there. It is not an easy relationship for many reasons, but saving our planet and acting in accordance with Indigenous tradition are one and the same.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eSalmon  and  people  came  back  to  the  coast  of  British  Columbia together  ten  thousand  years  ago  as  the  glaciers  receded.  The  land  had been  scraped  down  to  bare  rock  by  the  crushing  weight  of  the  ice. Salmon, swimming up the rivers by the millions to spawn and then die, helped  rebuild  the  soil,  feeding  trees  that  eventually  decayed,  became soil  and  fed  new  forests.  As  much  as  killing  was  important  to  the  survival of the humans, so was stewardship. They had to make sure they left enough for tomorrow, for their children, for the future.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAlliances  between  scientists  and  the  people  of  the  land  are  forged because  in  very  different  ways  we  personally  experience  the  changes, we  feel  the  death  of  the  land  and  this  urgency  drives  us.  Thinking  I could ignore the urge to push back against the destruction of the place I came to think of as home was a child’s view, because standing in this place, the harm was advancing on me as well.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eI  have  so  many  questions.  Do  world  leaders  and  CEOs  of  oil  companies,   manufacturers   of   pesticides   and   myriad   other   destructive industries experience niggling concern for their own children? Do they worry  whether  their  gated  community  can  withstand  the  brute  force of the runaway fires, floods and storms of this new climate regime they are  creating?  If  so,  they  must  hope,  if  even  for  an  instant,  that  someone is going to throw on the brakes and make sure there is enough left for  their  children  to  thrive.  Can  they  see  that  they  are  behaving  like addicts  to  rising  share  price,  that  they  are  on  a  treadmill  with  no  off switch,  harming  their  own,  as  they  take  us  straight  to Armageddon? Do  these  questions  strike  you  as  extreme?  If  they  do,  you  might  find that  by  the  time  you  finish  my  account  of  this  fight  to  save  the  wild salmon, the whales and ultimately the humans of the Pacific Northwest Coast,  you  might  be  asking  even  more  pointed  questions  yourself. Especially  given  that  as  I’m  finishing  this  manuscript,  the  world  is  in the grip of a viral pandemic that is revealing the cracks in the artificial web of life we hastily constructed and now depend on.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eA recent prime minister of Canada, Stephen Harper, said that environmental  activists  are  “terrorists”  and  he  began  legislating  how  such terrorists  would  be  dealt  with.  He  miscalculated.  Canadians,  for  the most  part,  did  not  accept  this  characterization  and  pushed  back  in the most wonderful way, by realizing they were activists too. This grassroots  support  took  the  target  off  our  backs  and  allowed  us  continue our work to keep natural systems alive.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eActivists are trying to protect all our children. If we, as a society, fail to bequeath a planet to future generations that can support human civilization, we will be the target of hate as hate has never been felt before. It is not hard to see that we are stealing the ability to thrive from future generations, but even as the destruction continues, the tide is turning.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003ePaul Hawken, in his book \u003ci\u003eBlessed Unrest\u003c\/i\u003e, calls activists Earth’s immune response. Jane Goodall, a beacon, assures scientists that it’s okay to be an activist—that, morally, you \u003ci\u003ehave\u003c\/i\u003e to be an activist. I now can add that it feels good to be an activist. It feels good to refuse to allow yourself to be chased—to turn around and meet those who are killing the planet with everything you are.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eTo undertake this journey from whale researcher to front-line activist was not a choice. The other option was to go numb and pray that I truly was powerless, that there really was nothing I could do. However, \u003ci\u003enothing\u003c\/i\u003e is  very  big.  Doing  nothing  requires  thousands  of  decisions  to  look the  other  way,  withdraw  your  hand,  clench  the  change  in  your  pocket, scoff, duck, lie and feed the very thing that is killing us.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe  governments  and  industry  I’ve  been  facing  off  with  over  the impact  of  fish  farming  on  the  marine  waters  of  British  Columbia  had a game plan. They knew what and who was going to get hurt, and they knew  how  to  feign  concern  while  their  actions  and  inactions  pushed wild  salmon  and  all  the  beings  that  depend  on  them  towards  extinction.  Did  they  think  the  changes  caused  by  the  devastating  pathogen spillage from industrial salmon feedlots would be better for us all in the long run? I don’t think so. But I do know that some people had made a decision to support the industry ahead of all other concerns. I learned that ministers of government had almost no idea what is going on; their senior  bureaucrats,  working  in  offices  a  couple  of  flights  downstairs, were  the  architects  of  what  happened  here.  The  ones  who  ignored  all the  evidence  must  have  known  they  were  up  to  no  good.  While  they were careful about leaving fingerprints, once they caught my interest, I followed them through access to information requests for their internal communications  like  I  had  once  followed  whales.  You’ll  see  that  I  did not find innocence or good intentions.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eMany scientists are sending increasingly urgent messages to society that  we  are  hurting  ourselves,  the  way  our  fingertips  send  messages  to the brain to pull our hands out of a fire. Bureaucrats try to insert themselves like sponges, absorbing our messages and wringing them out into sealed receptacles, making sure no one notices and can react. They tell their bosses and the world that we are activists, not \u003ci\u003ereal\u003c\/i\u003e scientists. Our funding dwindles, we endure financial ruin, our careers do not advance and  our  own  colleagues  and  allies  step  away  from  us.  We  are  slandered and our science is smothered, unless we can outsmart them.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThis is my story. I tell it because we learn from stories such as mine. During  the  first  two  decades  in  which  I  tried  to  save  the  ecosystem  I live in, I refused to use the word \u003ci\u003efight\u003c\/i\u003e, but I have adopted that term now. This is the story of a fight to keep part of this Earth alive.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eI have seen a lot, worked with people who could not be more different from each other and from myself, and watched in wonder as decades of  failure  mysteriously  blossomed  into  a  movement,  an  uprising,  and caused  change.  I  don’t  know  yet  if  that  change  will  be  enough—I  am waiting to hear from the wild salmon on this—but I know the survival of this part of the planet depends on this fight and everyone who stepped into the ring.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eI  have  been  on  the  front  lines  now  for  so  long  I  don’t  make  plans. I’m part of a wave of unstable, raw energy, the ruthless grinding of evolution in play. How can I possibly know whether I am available Tuesday at 2 p.m., three months from now? There might be a die-off in a salmon river to be investigated, an infestation to measure, a front line I have to stand on with my allies. I am careful with my energy now because there is always too much to do. I have opted to be the small mammal, not the big  dinosaur.  I  try  to  be  strategically  nimble  so  that  I  can  respond  to the shape and direction of the wave. I have intentionally kept my voice free  from  big  institutions  so  the  opposition  can’t  find  and  cut  off  my supply line, a braided trickle of support from a diversity of sources. I realized  that  when  I  was  responsible  for  the  salaries  of  other  people, I  had  to  be  careful  not  to  scare  funders  away  by  speaking  the  unvarnished truth. So I now work with allies, not employees.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThese allies are like wild horses, a tough, raw crowd. We experience a lot of casualties—hurt feelings, misunderstandings, the collision of egos, sudden departures—but we are inexorably moving in the same direction breaking the grip on the pulse of life. There is no leader negotiating on everyone’s behalf, who can be haltered and led into a barn, then silenced.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eI am part of the resistance movement against extinction. The movement spans the globe. We are a force of nature. Like a river, we well up, slip around, bore through and dive under obstacles. We don’t stop.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eNot all of this story is mine to tell and so there are some gaps. I have also withheld the names of people who have already suffered too much in this struggle. I hope my book will help, in at least a small way, to bring the  species  that  we  named \u003ci\u003ehuman\u003c\/i\u003e into  ecological  compliance  with  the planet we live on. This is not the time to give up.","brand":"Vintage Canada","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46304259309797,"sku":"NP9780735279681","price":16.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9780735279681.jpg?v=1767733904","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/products\/not-on-my-watch-isbn-9780735279681","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}