Fact Friday: Plastic Sea: a bird's eye view by Kirsti Blom and Geir Wing Gabrielsen

Fact Friday features Plastic Sea: a bird's-eye view by Kirsti Blom and Geir Wing Gabrielsen. unpgd. Wundermill Publishing Group/ The Cornell Labs Publishing Group, April, 2020. 9781943645503. (Review of finished purchased copy.)

Fact Friday features Plastic Sea: a bird's-eye view by Kirsti Blom and Geir Wing Gabrielsen. The problem of plastic is world-wide. This book was published in 2016 in Norway. It was translated and published here in the U.S. this spring. The narrative introduces the reader to a Northern Fulmer, a seabird who is adapted to spend days on the open ocean, returning to nest on cliffs and produce young. Unfortunately, plastic has become a part of their diet as it is often indistinguishable from its usual food. Plastic can't be digested and takes up space in the stomach leading the birds and all ocean life to slowly starve to death. According to the book, scientists know that 90% of Northern Fulmers have plastic in their stomachs. Humans use too much plastic and then throw it away instead of recycling it and it is killing ocean life. 

This oversized volume is filled with startling full-color photos and informative charts, such as one depicting, "How Long Until It's Gone?" Ingested plastic isn't the only danger to sea life. Plastic straws are inhaled and stuck in airways, ocean animals get stuck in abandoned fishing nets and drown or are strangled. The large font size and abundant white space make the message accessible and not too overwhelming. 

This book, along with others I have highlighted here and will highlight next week, is a call to action by all of us to rethink our reliance on the plastic - especially single-use plastic. While we must recycle what we do use, we need to stop using so much and demand that manufacturers find other ways of packaging products. Plastic Sea provides some suggestions for starting today!

We cannot have enough books on the shelf informing young readers that the time to change is now. Plastic Sea is a worthy addition to that shelf. I do have some quibbles. One is, though the facts conveyed by the authors are consistent with what I've read elsewhere, no attribution appeared either in the text or in the scanty back matter. Two, quite a number of photos were un-captioned or poorly captioned. Three, while there was a list of words to remember, they were not defined, which would've been instructive for young readers. Finally, four, there were no source notes, bibliography or suggestions for further reading, which would've made this a valuable resource for young researchers.