Let Them Eat Shrimp: The Tragic Disappearance of the Rainforests of the Sea

By Kennedy Warne

What’s the connection between a platter of jumbo shrimp at your local restaurant and murdered fishermen in Honduras, impoverished women in Ecuador, and disastrous hurricanes along America’s Gulf coast? Mangroves. Many people have never heard of these salt-water forests, but for those who depend on their riches, mangroves are indispensable. They are natural storm barriers, home to innumerable exotic creatures—from crabeating vipers to man-eating tigers—and provide food and livelihoods to millions of coastal dwellers. Now they are being destroyed to make way for shrimp farming and other coastal development. For those who stand in the way of these industries, the consequences can be deadly. 
 
 
In Let Them Eat Shrimp, Kennedy Warne takes readers into the muddy battle zone that is the mangrove forest. A tangle of snaking roots and twisted trunks, mangroves are often dismissed as foul wastelands. In fact, they are supermarkets of the sea, providing shellfish, crabs, honey, timber, and charcoal to coastal communities from Florida to South America to New Zealand. Generations have built their lives around mangroves and consider these swamps sacred. 
 
 
To shrimp farmers and land developers, mangroves simply represa good investment. The tidal land on which they stand often has no title, so with a nod and wink from a compliant official, it can be turned from a public resource to a private possession. The forests are bulldozed, their traditional users dispossessed. 
 
 
The true price of shrimp farming and other coastal developmhas gone largely unheralded in the U.S. media. A longtime journalist, Warne now captures the insatiability of these industries and the magic of the mangroves. His vivid account will make every reader pause before ordering the shrimp.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Island Press
• Release date: Jul 16, 2012
• ISBN: 9781610910248

Reviews for Let Them Eat Shrimp

[mtbearded1_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

61 of 75 for 2015. I may never eat shrimp again. OK That's not true, but having read Kennedy study of the mangrove forests around the world, I have a new appreciation for how our endless shrimp feasts are negatively impacting the climate. Mangrove forests grow around the world in the tropical latitudes. They grow as far north as Florida and as far south as the north island of New Zealand. They can be found on pretty much every continent except Europe and Antarctica, and usually in third world countries were the people who live within the forests or who depend on the forests are barely beyond the hunter-gatherer stage. I knew next to nothing about mangroves before reading Kennedy's work, and now know just a bit more, but enough to know that these relatively unknown and unappreciated parts of the environment are extremely important to our future. Mangroves are incredibly efficient carbon collectors, for example, and if we were to restore the forests we've cut down for shrimp farms, we could possibly reverse the ever growing amount of carbon we release into the atmosphere. Kennedy's book is quite readable, indeed at times seems more like a travelogue than a scientific tome. He takes the reader along to Ecuador, Brazil, Bangladesh, Panama, Tanzania, as well as Florida and other places around the world where humans interact, not always in the best way, with mangrove forests, the forests of the sea. I cannot recommend this book highly enough. It is a must read for anyone interested in climate change and the future of our world.