Joseph Ogilvy surfaces the previously hidden story of the California Coast. By turns paean to nature and cautionary tale, Tin Can Coast stars three marine species caught in the dragnet of human history.
About the Book
“You’ll never look at a can of tuna the same way again.”—Malcolm Harris, author of Palo Alto
Look west from San Francisco or Monterey, past the surfers and cargo ships. This is the California Current: 1,900 miles of the most productive waters on earth. It was here that eighteenth-century locals encountered frisbee-sized abalone, sardine schools the size of buses, and yellowfin tuna, each the size of a man. But it was not to last.
Over the course of three hundred years, the abalone, sardine, and tuna were swept into the violent undertow of history as those species became resources. Fishing and hunting drove the Spanish–Russian territory battle of the eighteenth century, California’s virulently racist first “conservation” laws in the nineteenth, and an ad campaign that kept America fed on just-like-chicken canned goods in the twentieth. Along the way, they became drivers of geopolitical competition, catalysts for the dramatic rise and fall of Cannery Row aristocracy, and even surly muses for John Steinbeck and Fritz Lang.
Collapsing the distinctions between human and natural history, Tin Can Coast brings the cautionary tale of the California shore to life.
About the Speakers
Joseph Ogilvy is a writer and chef. After graduating from Oxford University, he spent several years working in London restaurants, including Bocca di Lupo, while writing on his days off. His experience in kitchens led him to research involving the tangled human and ecological history of food. He now lives in Austin, Texas.
James Workman is a storyteller, entrepreneur, and author of author of natural resources resilience strategies, most recently the nonfiction fisheries narrative Sea Change, and his award-winning book Heart of Dryness. Drawing on fieldwork with Indigenous Kalahari people, he founded AquaShares, a firm pioneering water credit trading. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, The New Republic, Orion, Trout, and Washington Monthly. Workman studied at Yale, Oxford, and Stanford, and taught at Wesleyan and Whitman, but his real education came from restoring wildfires, reintroducing wolves, blowing up dams, smuggling to dissidents, getting married, and raising two daughters.
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