Get Your Free Audiobook

Preview
  • Not on My Watch

  • How a Renegade Whale Biologist Took on Governments and Industry to Save Wild Salmon
  • Written by: Alexandra Morton
  • Narrated by: Katie Ryerson
  • Length: 12 hrs and 45 mins

Prime logo New to Audible Prime Member exclusive:
2 credits with free trial
1 credit a month to use on any title to download and keep
Listen to anything from the Plus Catalogue—thousands of Audible Originals, podcasts and audiobooks
Download titles to your library and listen offline
₹199 per month after 30-day trial. Cancel anytime.

Not on My Watch

Written by: Alexandra Morton
Narrated by: Katie Ryerson
Free with 30-day trial

₹199 per month after 30-day trial. Cancel anytime.

Buy Now for ₹1,306.00

Buy Now for ₹1,306.00

Pay using card ending in
By confirming your purchase, you agree to Audible's Conditions of Use and Amazon's Privacy Notice.

Publisher's Summary

NATIONAL BESTSELLER

Alexandra Morton has been called "the Jane Goodall of Canada" because of her passionate thirty-year fight to save British Columbia's wild salmon. Her account of that fight is both inspiring in its own right and a roadmap of resistance.

Alexandra Morton came north from California in the early 1980s, following her first love--the northern resident orca. In remote Echo Bay, in the Broughton Archipelago, she found the perfect place to settle into all she had ever dreamed of: a lifetime of observing and learning what these big-brained mammals are saying to each other. She was lucky enough to get there just in time to witness a place of true natural abundance, and learned how to thrive in the wilderness as a scientist and a single mother.

Then, in 1989, industrial aquaculture moved into the region, chasing the whales away. Her fisherman neighbours asked her if she would write letters on their behalf to government explaining the damage the farms were doing to the fisheries, and one thing led to another. Soon Alex had shifted her scientific focus to documenting the infectious diseases and parasites that pour from the ocean farm pens of Atlantic salmon into the migration routes of wild Pacific salmon, and then to proving their disastrous impact on wild salmon and the entire ecosystem of the coast.

Alex stood against the farms, first representing her community, then alone, and at last as part of an uprising that built around her as ancient Indigenous governance resisted a province and a country that wouldn't obey their own court rulings. She has used her science, many acts of protest and the legal system in her unrelenting efforts to save wild salmon and ultimately the whales--a story that reveals her own doggedness and bravery but also shines a bright light on the ways other humans doggedly resist the truth. Here, she brilliantly calls those humans to account for the sake of us all.

©2021 Alexandra Morton (P)2021 Penguin Random House Canada

Critic Reviews

"A devastating literary exposé of one of the greatest scandals of recent Canadian history. What begins as a wholly human memoir of a reluctant activist takes on the urgency of a murder thriller—one in which the victims are wild salmon, coastal communities, science and democracy." (J.B. MacKinnon, author of The Once and Future World: Nature As It Was, As It Is, As It Could Be)

“[Not on My Watch] doesn’t read as an angry polemic. Rather, it’s an outline of a life spent standing up for something.” (Dana Gee, Vancouver Sun)

“How does a scientist and mother fight both foreign-owned fish farm cartels and lying governments? Alexandra Morton provides a thrilling recipe: a wallop of persistence, three decades of science, cups of stubbornness and the salt of undaunted courage. If the Pacific Northwest Coast's wild salmon can survive our industrial assault on their very existence, credit must go to the indomitable courage of Alex Morton and a brave renaissance in First Nations governance.” (Andrew Nikiforuk, author of Empire of Beetle and Slickwater)

What listeners say about Not on My Watch

Average Customer Ratings

Reviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.