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 fueled global 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 catch North America's most valuable seafood, including for Canada's Indigenous people who until now have been excluded from this industry. But overfishing and climate change are pushing lobster toward a cliff.

By 2050, it's expected that warming ocean waters in the Gulf of Maine will cut lobster populations by two thirds. In places like Maine, the heart of America's lobster industry, fishermen who don't see a future in lobster are already selling their boats and becoming farmers, growing kelp and raising oysters. Unlike previous fishery collapses, there's no other large-scale wild seafood species left that fishermen can switch to. The economic upheaval expected to follow the decline of lobster will devastate coastal communities in both Canada and the U.S. that have come to rely so much on it.

Greg Mercer takes readers on a global journey 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 what the future holds 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, Canada's oldest national newspaper, where he writes in-depth stories about issues affecting the country, 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's also reported for the BBC, the Guardian and the Toronto Star, Canada's largest newspaper. His reporting has earned him multiple National Newspaper Awards and the Michener Deacon Fellowship for investigative journalism. This is his first book.