Between Sea and Sky

"This book is a great ecological adventure. At its heart, it is a message of renewal and growth. It’s about the importance of friendship and holding on to hope no matter how bad things seem. The world she builds is quite muted and grey, but with flashes of colour and ideas that things can get better. It felt to me like a very realistic view of what the world could be like in the not too distant future, if we don’t take real action in the coming years against climate change as well as pollution and overfishing, the whole gamut of impacts that the ocean is facing from human activities. Between Sea and Sky is probably suitable for slightly younger children, 9-13 perhaps. I’m very keen on seaweed. The idea of restorative farming is really interesting and exciting. There are some innovative projects looking at new ways of creating food and other products from the ocean. Farming the ocean in a thoughtful, creative way is not about simply putting in high-value fish species like salmon, but looking for different organisms that can genuinely create benefits for the ocean as well as providing food. Seaweed is a big part of that. It removes carbon from the atmosphere, it can be made into animal feed that reduces the methane they produce, and it’s good for people to eat too. Seaweed isn’t going to solve every problem we have in the ocean, and it’s not going to work everywhere. These regenerative farms can incorporate other species, oysters, clams and so on, which can help clean the water and recycle nutrients within a three-dimensional farm that reaches from the surface down to the seabed. The concept also engenders a real sense of ownership of parts of the sea, which is something that’s often missing. People often think of the ocean as this big open space that no one owns. When it comes to ocean farming it can really be a case of a local ownership and stewardship. It’s great there are more people who want to produce food and make a living from the ocean in a way that’s going to create benefits and work for years to come rather than just stripping away ocean life and reaping the profits, which has happened so much before."