An eve with Greg Mercer

Bookmark is welcoming Globe and Mail reporter Greg Mercer to Charlottetown for the launch of his new book The Lobster Trap: The Global Fight for a Seafood on the Brink. The event will be held September 16 at 7 pm in the Schurman Market Square, inside Don & Marion MacDougall Hall at UPEI.

The Lobster Trap is 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.

In this deeply reported, resonant, timely book, Mercer takes readers 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.

 Mercer is an investigative reporter for The Globe and Mail, where he writes in-depth stories about issues of international interest. He was previously The Globe’s Atlantic Canada reporter, and 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.