The Rime of the Modern Mariner

"This graphic novel is a beautiful re-telling of Coleridge’s poem for our modern plastic-filled times. It carries a really chilling message about our consumer-driven lives and its consequences on our planet and the ocean in particular. The book is also an object of great loveliness with stunning illustrations. In and of itself it is a beautiful thing to have, but the story is also very touching and poignant. And it has lots of science in there. I love the way Hayes has used his artwork and poetry as a really imaginative way of telling the stories of the oceans and getting ideas across about the problems that we are causing. One of the big problems in the oceans is plastic waste, and the fact that so much of what we throw away or flush down the toilet ends up in the ocean and just stays there – it’s not biodegradable. A lot of it gets broken down into smaller and smaller fragments of plastic known as “mermaid tears”. These tiny plastic particles infiltrate marine ecosystems, causing all sorts of problems when animals eat them and choke on them, and because of toxic compounds associated with them. I was in the Red Sea just last year – every morning I would go out snorkelling on the reef next to where we were staying and I would pick up armfuls of plastic bags. I knew it wouldn’t make much difference in the grand scheme of things but it made me feel better. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter There is also the problem of climate change, which causes specific problems for the oceans like acidification – carbon dioxide not only warms up the atmosphere but it dissolves in the oceans, making them more acidic. That causes problems for all the creatures that live inside chalky, calcium-carbonate skeletons. The animals that build coral reefs, plus many plankton species and all sorts of organisms that are very important for ocean ecosystems, will suffer the consequences. We have to be positive that there are things we can do as individuals – everything from deciding which fish to eat, refusing to use plastic bags, that kind of thing. At the same time we can think about the bigger problems like climate change, and what we can do as individuals as well as nations to deal with that. There are many different scales at which we need to make our voices heard. We must also support the setting up of conservation areas. The UK at the moment is establishing a network of conservation areas around our shores. We desperately need things like that. We need to protect parts of the sea from these problems that we are inflicting on the whole planet, and give the oceans a chance to recover."