California was one of the last places in the world to join the “global economy,” but upon its discovery, the bounty of the “California Current” was plundered at record speed. In Tin Can Coast, author Joseph Ogilvy looks at the human and environmental history of the Golden State’s waters and the long succession of boom-and-bust cycles, which ultimately resulted in little but environmental devastation and a massive shoreline with almost no commercial fishing. 

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Ogilvy’s narrative is expansive, informative, and entertaining, while avoiding all of the pitfalls one might expect from a modern history of American capitalism. The reader is drawn into California’s unique character as a state where dreams are consistently taken too far and eventually turn into nightmares. 

Tin Can Coast opens with a description of California’s native peoples, including the Chumash of the Channel Islands, and the state’s entry into the global economy at the price of the mass slaughter of sea otters, primarily by Aleutian Islanders whom Russians had employed to do this work. The decimation of otter populations, as well as Spanish missionaries encouraging the natives to farm instead of gather shellfish, led to an explosion in the population of the abalone, a celebrated California sea snail. 

Here and throughout the book, Ogilvy emphasizes that when we look at the environment, our “baseline” is often drastically distorted by the devastating impacts of other human activities. This is true of America generally, with things such as the thickness of forests and the size of buffalo herds impacted by apocalyptic levels........

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