Alix Morris: A Year with the Seals

Environmental journalist Alix Morris spends an eye-opening year getting to know these elusive, intelligent creatures, investigating the effects of their extraordinary return from the brink of extinction and how we can try to bring nature back into balance.

It might be their large, strangely human eyes or their dog-like playfulness, but seals have long captured people's interest and affection, making them the perfect candidate for an environmental cause, as well as the subject of decades of study. Alix Morris spends a year with these magnetic creatures and brings them to life on the page, season by season, as she learns about their intelligence, their relationships with each other, their ecosystems, and the changing climate.

Morris also gets to know all of the competing interests in the intense debate about the newly recovered seal populations in our coastal waters, from local fishermen whose catch is often diminished by savvy seals, to tribes who once relied on seal-hunting for food, clothing, and medicine, to seal rescue workers and biologists, to surfers and swimmers now encountering seal-hunting sharks in coastal waters. A Year with the Seals is a rare look at what happens when conservation efforts actually work, and how human tampering with ecosystems continues to have unexpected consequences. But it’s also a gripping adventure story of a journalist determined to understand seals and our relationship with them for herself.

Alix Morris is a science writer in midcoast Maine. Her work has appeared in the Boston Globe Magazine, Smithsonian, Sierra Magazine, MIT Technology Review, Down East Magazine, and elsewhere, and she has graduate degrees in science writing from MIT and global health from Johns Hopkins.

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EVENT ACCESSIBILITY

This event will take place at street level. If possible, the event will be livestreamed to YouTube. ASL interpretation may be provided (based on the availability of interpreters) but must be requested at least 2 weeks in advance of the event. Seats are limited. Please email us at dGlja2V0aW5nIHwgYnJvb2tsaW5lYm9va3NtaXRoICEgY29t as soon as possible if you require ASL interpretation, guaranteed seating, or other accommodations. We will do our best to serve your needs!

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