The Lobster Trap - by Greg Mercer (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

A page-turning examination of how a multi-billion dollar industry creates enormous wealth and endless heartache, at a time when climate change, swings in the market, and greed are impacting fishermen's livelihoods in new and dramatic ways.

Lobster has been a phenomenal success story, with a commercial fishery that has generated enormous wealth and fuelled appetites for one of the world's most recognizable luxury foods. The great lobster boom that began in the 1990s has also led to violent fights over who has the right to catch this valuable seafood, including many Indigenous people in Canada, who until recently have been excluded from this industry. Now overfishing, trade wars, and climate change are threatening the future of this fishery in deeply troubling ways.

By 2050, scientists expect that warming ocean waters in the heart of North America's lobster fishing region will cut catches by two thirds. In some parts of America, there's hardly any lobster left to catch. Unlike previous collapses, there are few other large-scale wild seafood species left that fishing crews can switch to. The economic upheaval for fishermen and seafood companies alike could devastate coastal communities in both Canada and the United States.

In this deeply reported, resonant, timely book, Greg Mercer takes readers on a fascinating global journey and inside this precarious moment for the lobster industry, to show the money and heartache, and the danger and violence, tied up in it. Along the way, he explores lobster's remarkable history, the gold-rush mentality that surrounds it, and examines the looming crisis for this most precious shellfish.

Review Quotes

"The Lobster Trap is a beautiful, briny reckoning--a clear-eyed portrait of coastal communities caught between old rhythms and a new, less forgiving ocean. Greg Mercer brings the same instinct for character and place that defines his journalism, but here it deepens into something richer: a kind of elegy that still holds space for grit, grace, and dark humour. This is a book about a fishery--but also about memory, climate, and capitalism; about what gets passed down, and what's being lost. Mercer doesn't steer the story so much as trail it like a line through water, letting the rhythms of coastal life and the people living it shape its arc. In doing so, he gives us something rare: a story that's urgent, unshowy, and quietly unforgettable."
--Chris Wilson-Smith, Report on Business, Globe and Mail

About the Author

GREG MERCER is an investigative reporter for The Globe and Mail, where he writes in-depth stories about issues of international interest, from the drone-spying scandal at the Paris Olympics to the deadly legacy of the coal mining industry. He was previously the Globe's Atlantic Canada reporter, where he covered the worst mass shooting in Canadian history, and wrote about violent protests over a growing First Nations-run commercial lobster fishery. He has also reported for the BBC, The Guardian, and The Toronto Star. His reporting has earned him multiple National Newspaper Awards and the Michener-Deacon Fellowship for Investigative Reporting. This is his first book.